


let me see what spring is like

by Izulkowa, lattely



Series: snippets from a lover's calendar [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Avengers Family, Bisexual Steve Rogers, Captain America Steve Rogers/Modern Bucky Barnes, Clint Barton Is a Good Bro, Coming Out, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Gay Bucky Barnes, Holiday Season, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Panic Attacks, Pining, Pre-World War II Bucky Barnes, Public Display of Affection, Shrunkyclunks, Steve speaks french, Tony is an ass but he's trying his best, War Veteran Bucky Barnes, nothing too lengthy though, shameless exploitation of the three words Steve says in French in CA:TWS, which is to say
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-03 19:50:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17884103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Izulkowa/pseuds/Izulkowa, https://archiveofourown.org/users/lattely/pseuds/lattely
Summary: Steve Rogers did not anticipate his composure going to hell and back because of a pair of blue eyes.Or, a story about how a cup of coffee can give you more than just a fleeting burst of energy you don’t know how to utilize.





	let me see what spring is like

**Author's Note:**

> This is the very first story of mine that extends past 5k. It took four months to write - but man, was every second worth it. I'm incredibly proud of myself for sticking with it until the end.
> 
> A huge thank you goes out to my wonderful artist [izulkowa](http://izulkowa.tumblr.com), who was nothing but a delight to work with. Check out the gorgeous art she made for my fic [here](http://izulkowa.tumblr.com/post/182976065766/let-me-see-what-spring-is-like-ao3-fic-by)!
> 
> Another thank you flies to my amazing beta [River](http://lesbuchanan.tumblr.com), who's honestly one of my favorite people on this Earth. They need to be loved and cherished into eternity, dude.
> 
> Last but not least, I need to thank my friend K, who will hopefully read this fic one day - for egging me on and for texting me at 9am about how her bus caught on fire. (She's okay.)
> 
> Title comes from the delightful song _Fly Me To The Moon_ by the love of my ears' life, Frank Sinatra.
> 
>  **September 6th 2019 edit:** I kept on rewriting the initial description of Bucky, but as of today, it seems like I have reached perfection. Sorry for any confusion, you aren’t seeing things ;)

It’s because of Clint and his coping mechanisms that Steve finds himself shuffling through Manhattan, head bowed down, working a well-known path towards a small coffeehouse known adorably as The Yellow Bowtie, that he entered by accident one spring afternoon and hasn’t betrayed for another ever since.

Steve tugs his scarf higher up his face, burying his nose in the dark red wool. The early November frost is pinching at his cheeks, wind whipping around him, and he shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket. He’d underestimated the weather forecast and left his gloves behind, tucked away in a drawer somewhere, probably buried under all the Avengers merchandise his teammates thought exceptionally hilarious to gift him.

He needed to get out of the Tower. Sometimes, after missions, Steve can’t stand to look at them all, and though he feels like a righteous asshole for it, he gives in when his subconscious begs him to get them out of his sight. It’s not them, specifically, it’s the presence of familiar faces in general. No, it doesn’t make him a dick, Sam always assures.

When he was going out, twenty minutes prior to now, Steve passed by the common room to notify those occupying it that he was leaving of his own volition and had not, in fact, been kidnapped. They all acknowledged him in some form or other, but without any real effort; they’re all used to Steve disappearing for a couple of hours after coming back to the Tower, as soon as they’re all sorted out and cleared to go.

While Steve was waiting for the lift, Clint looked up from a worn-out copy of some cheesy romance novel (he firmly insists they help him get by, and no one reasons with that. They all struggle to shoulder a shitload of upsetting memories on a daily basis - judging how others deal with it is number one on the unspoken list of all things forbidden in the Tower).

“You know,” he said, pointing to Steve with a folded napkin doubling as a bookmark, “when I’m having a bad day, I throw back something really sweet to drink. I’m talking, so sweet all your teeth will fall out.”

Clint then frowned, tilting his head like a six-months-old golden retriever in purple sweatpants. Steve could sense the vibrations of a thought process of national importance taking place in his brain.

“Can your teeth fall out?” Clint finally asked. “Or will you be a walking toothpaste ad until you’re ninety?”

Steve refrained from noting he had crossed his ninetieth birthday off his calendar some time ago, instead shrugging with a weak laugh, and he stepped into the opening doors of the lift. Clint saluted him with the green napkin and went back to reading, his feet in a dozing Natasha’s lap.

Steve has never preferred his coffee spiked to the brim with sugar, and it still hasn’t changed now. He usually orders anything but so sweet to send his brain into overdrive, but well, it won’t kill him to sidestep the ordinary. The worst that can happen is an urge to chug three bottles of water in a row.

He really is in a foul mood, he realises as he dodges to clear the way for a young woman with a handful of paper bags who’s apparently trying to outrace herself down the sidewalk.

The latest mission wasn’t that hard of a nut to crack, not really, and Steve is all the more exasperated by the state he is in. It was the ordinary bust in, beat up some thugs, board the quinjet with a shattered hip bone and a sense of a fulfilled duty. No one even died, and yet Steve still wants to yell into his pillow for the rest of the day.

He swipes a hand across his face. _Jesus_ , he thinks. Maybe Clint’s idea isn’t that stupid after all - and when Clint’s ideas don’t sound dumb anymore, Steve knows he’s in deep.

Despite it being rush hour on a Tuesday, he reaches the coffeeshop quicker than he anticipated (he refuses to consider the possibility of it being because people scurry out of his way by basic instinct, startled by his size. Though it probably is the case, most of the time. Oh, Bruce would have a field day with that).

He pushes open the door, scoffing at his reflection he catches in the glass - in the ridiculous fake glasses in thick black frames and a baseball cap swapped out for a woollen hat matching the scarf, Tony has baptised him a sorority girl’s wet dream. It’s earned him a smack across the back of the head from Nat.

Thankfully, all of Steve’s thoughts about Tony’s antics are wiped out by a sudden waft of a smell that can be described as nothing else but happiness filling Steve’s lungs - freshly ground coffee and buttery cookies.

He smiles, breathing in with relish.

Inside are more people than Steve is used to when he pops by. It’s mostly college students, fingers flitting across the keyboards of their laptops to finish overdue essays, and office workers making phone calls, sipping at their drinks hurriedly in-between spitting out a flurry of names and numbers into their speakers.

Steve settles at the end of the queue.

It moves fast and before long, he’s forced to make a final decision and draw his eyes away from the menu written in white chalk on a blackboard on the wall. Opting for a caramel concoction that goes by the name of Fall’s Sweetest Brew on the board, he lowers his eyes to the barista to place an order.

But when they land on the man behind the register, Steve’s voice promptly dies down in his throat, because the barista in question turns out to be the prettiest person Steve has ever laid eyes on.

He’s tall - though shorter than Steve by about three inches - and lean; the sleek build of a swimmer. His prominent cheekbones and chiseled jaw appear sharp enough to split vibranium, and his dark, mussed short hair begs to have Steve’s fingers run through it. Oh, both the longer strands on top and the studiously trimmed sides must be so soft.

Most of all, though, his eyes - his clear, steel blue eyes framed by dark eyelashes, bright with a good-natured cheer not many people are able to muster up at fuck you o’clock in the morning.

The guy is looking at him expectantly and Steve opens his mouth in a valiant attempt to speak, but the only thing that rolls down his tongue is a deflated sort of ‘guh’.

“Sir, are you alright?” the guy asks. He’s visibly fighting down a laugh, biting at his full lower lip, as if he’s met with this sort of reaction often enough to be entertained by Steve’s slack-faced idiocy, as opposed to a perplexed wringing of his hands when subjected to it.

“Yeah,” Steve wheezes, then pretends to cough. “Yeah, yes,” he repeats. _Real smooth, Rogers._

Steve had a hand at winning a war with just a modicum of men at his side, yet all his resolve crumbles before an attractive man ( _more like_ _a mouth-watering piece of eyecandy,_ his brain chimes in like a thunderstruck high schooler, and Steve wants nothing more than to knock on the door to his own head and ask it to keep it down).

The guy smiles, his eyes glinting with amusement. “What can I get you?” he says, all innocent, like it’s not one bit his fault that Steve nearly suffered an aneurysm.

Steve (only barely) recites his order and steps off to the side to wait for the drink. Beside him, a girl with more piercings he ever thought physically possible is tapping away on her phone, big headphones with cat ears hooked around her tattooed neck.

When another barista, a young woman with bouncy blonde curls, announces a large chai tea is ready to be picked up, the girl’s head snaps up and her eyes lock with Steve’s. He looks on as the boredom on her face melts into dumbstruck recognition. Subconsciously, the girl glances down to where her open jacket reveals the star-spangled shield printed on her shirt, and when her eyes fly back up, they’re comically wide.

She grabs the paper cup the barista has set on the counter, mumbling a distracted ‘thanks’ to no one in particular, and as she dashes out of the coffeeshop, she’s desperately fumbling for her smartphone again, dialing a number and putting the phone to her ear.

Not an awful lot of people recognise Steve on the street, mostly because Pepper always makes sure he’s in somewhat of a disguise whenever he leaves the Tower (nowadays, it’s more of Pepper’s voice embedded in Steve’s mind scolding him to put on his good-for-nothing glasses, not really Pepper herself), but there’s always an exception or two to the rule. Sometimes he’s stopped for a brief chat that includes more _oh my God_ ’s than strictly necessary, or shyly asked for a photo or an autograph, or either he’s simply ogled with a frantic disbelief, which he politely pretends not to notice. He’s grown used to it.

The blonde barista bellows that a mocha with caramel and cinnamon is done (that’s what Steve signed up for drinking, it appears), and when Steve moves forward to take it, the cute dark-haired guy swoops swiftly in. Steve frowns, confused, as he mutters something into his colleague’s ear; she chuckles at his words, shaking her head fondly.

“Fine,” she laughs and steps away from him, to return after a moment with something in a small paper bag in her hands.

Steve watches in befuddlement as the guy plucks both the cup and the bag from her hands, shouting “I owe you one!” over his shoulder, and produces a black marker out of nowhere. He scribbles something quickly on the bag, pockets the marker, and finally, _finally_ turns to Steve, who’s, at that point, lost sense of everything around him, to be quite honest.

The guy hands Steve his coffee and the mysterious paper bag. “There you go, sir,” he says. Steve’s frown deepens, but when he’s about to point out the obvious mistake, the guy flashes him a dazzling smile, and Steve shuts up in an instant (if all his insides melt into a goo at the glorious sight before him, he elects not to acknowledge it).

“It’s on the house,” the guy says; his voice is low, confidential.

Steve fights his tongue to unglue from the roof of his mouth.

“I, uh. Thank you,” he says, taking both his drink and the bag from the guy’s outstretched hands. Steve’s never been offered anything on the house - except for that one time when he was eight and lost his change, and the grocer took pity on him - and he wills himself to smile, because he’s a well-behaved person and he has manners (even if all it takes for everything his ma has ever taught him to evaporate from his head at once is one sinfully gorgeous man).

“It’s nothing,” the guy says and _winks_ , and Steve makes a beeline for the door while his feet are still willing to comply under him.

He only looks down at the bag in his hands when he’s a good twenty yards away from The Yellow Bowtie, scuttling along with the stream of determined New Yorkers. On the brown paper, there’s a note in the guy’s small, neat handwriting: _you looked sad standing in that queue, i thought maybe this would help. i hope you’re not allergic to chocolate._ Below the text, a smiley face beams up at Steve from the paper.

He opens the bag; inside sits a chocolate cookie the size of Steve’s open palm.

It goes well with the coffee, he finds.

 

* * *

 

The thing about mood-lifters is that they don’t last overnight.

When Steve wakes up to the sound of his alarm, he expects the sourness of the past day to be gone, replaced by a brand new attitude, but all he gets is a formidable yearning to squeeze his eyes shut and go back to sleep.

Instead, he devotes a couple of minutes to shouting into his forearm, and drags himself out of bed.

He does what needs to be done in the bathroom, methodically changes into his workout gear, and leaves his suite with his sneakers in hand, not bothering to close the door behind him. He pulls the shoes on on his way down the hallway, hopping up and down like a rabbit. He’s supremely glad no one is with him to watch him toil with tying his shoelaces on the move.

He stops by the common floor to grab a bottle of water from the fridge. He doesn’t expect anyone to be up this early in the morning, because no other inhabitants of the Tower ever are, but when he exits the communal kitchen to head back to the elevator, he notices Natasha squeezed into a corner of one of the massive couches, curled up like a sleeping panther. Her eyes are covered by a glittery sleeping mask, and she has a show Steve recognizes as _The Golden Girls_ running on mute on the ginormous plasma TV Steve still doesn’t quite apprehend the mechanism of.

“Bad morning?” Nat murmurs as he passes her by. He doesn’t trouble himself with incredulity on how she knew of his presence (from what he can see from where he’s standing, she’s also wearing ear plugs) - she’s Natasha, after all, and that is explanation enough in itself.

He gives a noncommittal grunt of confirmation. She hums.

“Have a good run,” she says, pulling her afghan up blindly. Steve nods, grateful for the lack of questioning.

“Thanks,” he says and enters the elevator.

When the run doesn’t help, and then a long, scalding hot shower doesn’t, either, Steve grits his teeth and is out the door again before he can think twice about it. The others are eating breakfast when he storms past; Bruce looks like wants to say something, but he quickly changes his mind and shovels a grilled cheese sandwich into his mouth.

Steve ran nine goddamn miles, pushing himself to sprint as fast as he could to check whether his lungs would eventually tire out and leave him a wheezing, panting mess, but they never did. He wasn’t even a tad breathless.

He’s sure he’s left a crack in the pavement where he’s hurled his bottle of water at it, frustrated and livid.

With his hat low on his ears, Steve stomps down the path etched into his muscle memory, allowing his legs to lead him down the sidewalk, until he’s opening the doors with today’s special (lavender latte with vanilla, which he is both intrigued and baffled by) calligraphed on the glass in swooping cursive.

The door swings closed behind Steve as he comes in. He stands at the end of the queue and lets himself be swept up in the comforting scent of familiarity. Years may pass, dates may change, but coffee sure as hell smells the same in every century.

When he looks up from the floor after the last person remaining in front of him has walked aside, Steve freezes.

The guy from yesterday is smiling at him from across the counter.

“Hello,” he says. His hair is more tidy than the day before, brushed down carelessly rather than defying gravity by sticking up in every possible direction. Steve’s voice of reason stamps his need to mess it up with his hand out like a starting fire. “What can I get you today?”

Steve gurgles out his order (he congratulates himself on being able to dig his voice out of his mouth), and while the guy enters it into the register, Steve steals a quick look at his nametag - the silver letters, stark against the black pin, make him a James.

 _Pretty name for a pretty man_ , Steve thinks and instantly wants to kick himself in the face.

James hands over Steve’s change, the tips of his fingers brushing against Steve’s palm, making a swarm of butterflies take flight in Steve’s stomach, and he turns away to bustle by the coffee machines.

Steve makes himself take up the wait on the opposite end of the counter, tossing the coins into his pocket instead of into his wallet - his brain is too preoccupied with doodling hearts around his and James’ joint initials to care.

Steve tries to pretend to look like everyone else around him does, disinterested in anything except getting their hands on whatever drink they desire and dashing off to run their errands. But then James’ colleague clears Steve’s line of sight by shifting to pass a paper cup over to a waiting client, and he can see James again, tinkering with the machines.

The black jeans he’s wearing hug the swell of his ass in just the way to make Steve want to eat his own teeth, and _God_ , he is definitely trying to give Steve a heart attack. It’s going to be engraved on his tombstone, Steve can picture it - _killed by the world’s finest ass._

Thankfully - or maybe unfortunately - James turns around in time not to permit Steve, caught up on the fine spectacle James makes, to swallow his own tongue. He puts a plastic lid on Steve’s cup, setting it carefully aside, and disappears from view as he dives to extract something from a glass-paneled display of baked goods.

When he straightens back up, his hand is curled around a bulging paper bag with something Steve can’t decipher from a distance written on it in black marker. Steve can feel his eyebrows shooting up into his hairline.

James swipes the cup from where he’s placed it and heads towards Steve, a smile playing at his wide mouth. He leans over the white marble countertop, extending the one hand holding the cup and the damn bag towards Steve, using the other to prop himself up.

The tendons in his neck flex when the weight of his body comes to rest on his arm, and Steve follows them with his eyes as they shift beneath his skin.

“There you go,” James says when Steve takes both items out of his grasp. “Enjoy,” he adds. This time, Steve doesn’t try to protest, because something in James’ expression, the arch of his lips, the subtle lift of his dark eyebrows, is silently adamant on this small gesture of humanity, and Steve knows arguing would be fruitless.

Instead, he crooks a shy smile. “Thanks so much,” he says, and gets out of the coffee shop before the storm already swirling in his belly can build up to actual tears because of a simple kindness.

Walking down the street, he reads the note on the bag. In the same cramped letters, it says, _you were moping again. bad week?_ Steve smiles under his breath in spite of the feeling of blunt unsettlement tugging restlessly on his insides ever since he woke up today. _You could say that_ , he thinks, chasing away the memory of a masked goon’s excruciated shriek when his kneecaps cracked under the impact of Steve’s shield on the latest mission.

The bag ruffles as Steve unglues the sticker with The Yellow Bowtie’s logo holding down the rolled-up opening, the sound comforting amongst the rush of a weekday’s grey morning.

Folded into a napkin, the brown paper holds a round, golden cookie shining with butter. It melts on Steve’s tongue, leaving his fingertips glossy and his heart lighter.

 

* * *

 

Over the following week, it becomes a routine - Steve rises before the sun can peek over the horizon, like he has since the dawn of time, and he beats five miles down New York’s waking streets, his head hanging low not to be recognised. He doubts any person who’s miserably out and about at the time he runs has much else than how warm their bed back home is on their sleep-bleary mind; he’s a creature of habit, though.

After he’s back at the Tower, sweat pouring down his back, he sets himself to rights and without eating breakfast like he should, he flees, moving with and against what is now a thick crowd of people tending to their lives. He walks quickly, his feet hitting the ground in brisk succession until he finds himself surrounded by the blissful aroma of coffee and sweet warmth.

James is there every time Steve comes in. Not a single morning does he fail to sneak Steve a paper bag with a quick but ever-present note in black marker, and a delicious treasure inside.

On a gloomy Monday morning, a day before the date marking one full week since Steve first looked into the irresistible pair of baby blues and missed making an idiot out of himself by a hair, he breaks the pattern - he doesn’t ask for his coffee to be prepared to go.

“We will bring your drink to your table, sir,” the curly-haired blond girl from before who’s taking his order says with a smile so bright it makes a dimple show up in her left cheek. Steve takes it as his cue to go and he turns, sweeping his eyes over the café in a search for a free table, patting the rain off of his hat.

Outside, people are unfolding their umbrellas, one after the other, like on command. A middle-aged woman ducks vehemently to avoid having her eye poked out. She shoots the young man walking in front of her a glare screaming _murder_ as he looks over his shoulder, staggering over his own apologies. When the woman looks to be in no hurry to cut him some slack, he darts away, face burning bright red, not unlike his umbrella.

Steve spots an unoccupied table for two, tucked away in the corner, next to the window. He heads over, slipping past two teenage girls sat huddled together over their coffees, their hands interlocked on the table, and he sinks down into the plush armchair, leaning his head back against the soft headboard. Overhead, strings of lightbulbs crossing across the ceiling cast a warm glow over the coffee shop.

Steve feels something tickle the top of his head and he looks up; a potted plant’s long, thin leaves are spilling past the rim of its ceramic pot, grazing over his hair. He twists his neck to see better - the plant is one of many taking up racks upon racks of shelves that look suspiciously like repurposed wooden crates.

Under closer scrutiny, all of the plants have names attached to their pots on little pieces of paper. The one trying to make new friends is called Hollie, the decorative handwriting on its scrap of paper proclaims.

The dimple-cheeked barista distracts Steve from reading the rest of the names by materializing at his table with a tray laden with cups balanced on her forearm. When she crouches to put Steve’s cup in front of him, he can’t help but glimpse the nametag pinned to her black turtleneck; the plant is her namesake.

Steve laughs quietly to himself.

“Thank you,” he says, still smiling, after Hollie stands up straight again. She beams, her dimple making a reappearance.

“I hope you enjoy your coffee, sir,” she says, swiping her golden locks out of her eyes. Then she spins on her heel and is gone.

Taking a careful sip, Steve looks around at the people already exhausted by the upcoming week swamping the café; the flock of thick coats, the tiresome pacing of booted feet.

So many faces flushed by the cold, so many frostbitten hands, but no matter the effort with which Steve’s eyes comb through the room, there’s no trace of a dark head of tousled hair. Steve’s heart falls, and he wraps his fingers around his steaming cup, disappointed.

He’s been looking forwards to seeing James again, because really, Steve would be lying if he claimed that the only thing that cheers him up day after day is the free candy.

He drags another sip out of the polka-dotted cup.

The first time Steve caught himself looking at another boy in a way that transcended a friendly look was some days before his tenth birthday. He was sitting on a bench by the neighborhood’s football field that was nothing but a stretch of uneven asphalt squeezed in-between the flaking tenements, swinging his legs, too short to touch the ground, back and forth.

A group of older boys from the brownstone next to Steve’s were kicking a ball between themselves, shouting gleefully in the afternoon heat. Their shirts were sticking to their backs, hair plastered to their foreheads, darkened by sweat, and Steve couldn’t help but look at one of the boys especially - Allen Powell.

Allen was the one of the boys who lived in Steve’s building, a floor above his. He was twelve, and unlike most, he was kind to Steve. Once, after Steve had taken a beating, he’s brought him upstairs to his mousehole of an apartment and cleaned his wounds as best as he could with water and a cloth. On every occasion he was running down the stairs with a football under his arm, he asked Steve if he wanted to play, too. Steve always shook his head no.

Allen’s dark brown eyes had flecks of gold in them, and his hair was auburn, the color of tea. He was the first person who made Steve speculate over love.

Undeterred by the cruel ways of law he couldn’t comprehend and the once overheard mocking jeers directed at two terrified young men, Steve wasn’t concerned, nor was he ashamed. His ma always said there was nothing wrong with love, and she was never mistaken.

When Steve was eleven and Allen had long since moved away, a new girl in class caught Steve’s eye. Her long hair was pulled back into two fair braids, and she smiled at him from across the classroom when she noticed him staring, pale pink spreading across her pretty face.

Back at home that day, Steve waited until his ma came home from work. When she walked into their apartment, fatigue marring her features, he ran to wrap his thin arms around her legs, the fabric of her long dress cool against his cheek as he cried. Wasn’t he obliged to choose one, girls or boys? Mrs Selleck, his math teacher, has always said indecisiveness was one of the worst of human flaws.

Sarah Rogers closed the door behind herself and, threading her fingers through her son’s hair, she smiled. ‘Stevie, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘It’s alright. You don’t pick a sex. You pick a person.’

Years later, when Erskine’s serum was newly coursing through his veins, Steve realised once again that his ma was right - the serum terminated all his body’s faults and illnesses, made him perfect to every littlest detail, and yet Steve still found himself enticed by the curve of a man’s spine, or the line of his jaw. The serum didn’t get rid of the way Steve was, because there was nothing to get rid of.

Nowadays, Steve has learned, there is a word for him to use: bisexual. In the Tower, he has a pride flag pinned above his bed. The pink, purple and blue are the first thing one sees when they come into his bedroom.

He’s been told that same-sex relationships are widely accepted now, that two dames or two fellas can hold hands on the street and not pretend out of fear that they don’t love each other. At first, Steve couldn’t fathom the change he thought would never take place.

He looks at the couple at the table opposite his. One of the girls, dark-skinned, with cornrows spilling out from under a yellow beanie, leans forward to skim a kiss over her girlfriend’s nose, to her amused indignation. The short-haired girl ruffles the other’s braids and they both giggle, so obviously, helplessly in love.

Out of the blue, Steve’s field of vision is obscured by someone in a pressed black button-down, standing close enough for Steve to assume they want to involve him in something for which, in all likelihood, he has no energy whatsoever.

Before he has a chance to grieve through what they have to say, though, Steve notices a small paper bag the person is thrusting out at him.

On the bag, there is one word, scrawled in a recognizable handwriting - _hello_.

Steve lets his eyes slide from the bag up the person’s torso, and surely, he is met with James’ eyes, looking down at him with a bashful gaiety. Steve’s heart sommersaults in his chest like a child’s would when faced with the perspective of spending a Saturday in an amusement park.

“Hi,” Steve rasps out, his throat suddenly dry as sandpaper. James’ face breaks into a smile.

“This seat taken?” he asks, motioning to the armchair facing Steve’s with a tilt of his head. Steve curls his stretched-out legs under the chair to make space under the table.

“Not really, no,” he says, and unceremoniously, James plops down in front of him.

He pushes the bag towards Steve across the table, encouraging him wordlessly to open it. Steve peers inside; this time, James picked a small blueberry muffin. Steve takes it out gingerly, brushing off a crumb stuck to the paper shell and licking it off of his thumb.

“Thank you,” he says, an apprehensive smile curling his lips upward. James waves a hand vaguely in dismissal.

“Don’t, it’s alright,” he affirms with a beam of his own.

They’re both silent, Steve fingering with the edge of the muffin’s mould, separating it from the dough and peeling it away completely. He breaks the muffin clean in half and hands one of the parts to James. “Here. It’s only fair.”

A huff of amusement escapes James’ nose. “You’re the sharing type, huh,” he says but he takes the offered half, if after a second’s hesitation.

Steve smiles, bites off a piece of his own half. “I guess so.” He’s always shared everything he had, even when he had nothing at all.

James plucks at his part of muffin, eating it crumb by tiny crumb like a small kid. Taking another bite, Steve wonders if he’s had breakfast today.

“So,” he says after he’s swallowed his last mouthful. “Why are you doing this thing? Giving me all this, I mean.”

James looks up from his muffin; shallow creases form on his forehead as he frowns. Steve rushes to follow up.

“Not that I’m not thankful for it,” he says, folding the muffin’s remaining paper mould into a half, then into a quarter. “I am, extremely. Just, why?”

James flashes him one of his blinding grins and puts his muffin aside. “You want me to be honest?” he says, pushing the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt higher up his crossed forearms. Steve’s eyes linger on the revealed tan skin, chase a vein running along it. James has the forearms of someone who could bench-press a table set fully for dinner without breaking a sweat.

“Yeah, that’s why I’m asking,” Steve laughs. When he doesn’t say anything else, only looks, James’ laughter-rumpled face smooths out, his expression moulding to a indecipherable sort of serenity. His eyes bore into Steve with a peculiar focus, intense but nevertheless pleasant; Steve’s inner self squirms under the prudent examination.

“I’m doing it because,” James says at last, leaning in for Steve to hear his lowered voice, “you look like you need a friend.”

Steve looks into James’ earnest face, at the patch of flour staining the corner of his collar.

Yeah, maybe he does need a friend. Someone to acknowledge that he’s not an unmoving symbol from the yellowed pages of history books, but a living, breathing human. He needs someone to actually make him _feel_ like one, to toss the shield aside, let it clatter against the ground, so Steve can finally exhale and laugh instead of scowling.

Sure, he has Sam, but with him, there’s always the unfortunate shadow of the Captain America mantle looming in the distance. Sam is too close to the whole Avengers facet. What Steve needs, wants, is an everyday person who doesn’t play superhero, and who complains about their job because it’s mind-numbingly boring, not because it’s a threat to their life.

The corners of his mouth quirking up, Steve sticks out his hand. “I’m Steve.”

James lights up, the solemn set of his face stepping back to make space for joy. He shakes the proffered hand, exposing his movie star’s teeth, snow-white and perfectly even, in a face-splitting grin. “My friends call me Bucky.”

At Steve’s surprised look, James (Bucky?) chuckles. “It’s a nickname. Don’t worry, my parents aren’t insane.”

Steve chortles in response. He moves his tongue inside his closed mouth to roll the name given to him against the back of his throat.

The nametag says James, but as Steve tries ‘Bucky’ out, curious, he comes to a conclusion that the two syllables of James’ nickname suit him significantly more. ‘James’ has a dignified coldness to it, unfitting for its owner’s wolfish smirks thrown over the shoulder and cleverly bold jokes shouted above the hiss of the milk frothers, bordering on inappropriate but not quite crossing the boundary. ‘Bucky’ is perfect for his fleeting winks, short and playful, like they are.

“Steve,” Bucky says, his mouth twitching. “You know that friends go places together, yeah?”

“I know how having friends works, stop it,” Steve lets out a peal of laughter, and Bucky laughs with him, like they’ve known each other for years.

“Right,” Bucky says. “So, you got time?”

Steve raises his eyebrows. “What, now?”

“As good a time as any,” Bucky says, amused. “You ever been to the MET?”

Steve shakes his head.

He’s been wanting to go for months now, his artist’s soul tugging on his metaphorical sleeve, but there was always some reason stopping him from actually visiting the museum, whether it was a mission, Clint’s broken ankle, or Nat insisting on having him watch _Breaking Bad_ ‘right the fuck now’.

“ _What_ ,” Bucky says flatly, his eyes round with shock. “Are you from New York?”

Steve nods. Bucky’s eyebrows skyrocket. “And you’ve never gone to the MET?”

Steve laughs at Bucky’s outrage. “Never.”

Bucky hides his face in his hands. “Jesus Christ, are you a goddamn Neanderthal?” He jumps out of his chair and points at Steve with a single finger. “Let me get my stuff, we’re going now,” he adds and bolts away.

He’s back in the blink of an eye, shrugging on a black peacoat.

“I got Thomas to cover for me. Come on, get up!” he says, doing up his buttons.

“Fine, okay!” Steve surrenders. He snatches his own jacket from where it’s draped over the armrest and pulls it on. “What about my coffee?” he gestures to the half-drained cup after he’s slid his gloves on.

“Steve, I couldn’t care less about it right now,” Bucky says. He grabs Steve’s bicep and drags him behind him towards the door. Steve’s skin burns under the long fingers wrapping around his arm.

Bucky doesn’t pay any attention to the light but firm grip he has on Steve, as if casually getting his hands on people he’s just met (officially, at least) is not something worth his while pondering over.

Not that Steve minds.

They take the subway; rush hour in its peak forces them to stand with their arms crammed tightly together to allow as many hasty passengers as possible to board the train, jostling anyone near with their overstuffed bags and clumsy elbows.

Bucky’s body heat radiating through both of their coats causes coils of tickling warmth to skip down Steve’s spine, distracting him from someone’s umbrella - he hopes - digging into his back.

To make matters worse, Bucky smells like heaven personified. In whatever he’s wearing, there are distinct notes of sharp citrus, a zest of Steve’s beloved lavender, and the sweet, sweet tang of patchouli (Steve knows it’s patchouli because Tony has once dragged him along for a tour of his most treasured perfumeries in Manhattan, and it was on Madison Avenue that Steve unknowingly brought his penchant for the scent to light). The blend is making Steve itch to bury his nose in the skin under Bucky’s ear and just breathe him in.

He blames his enhanced sense of smell.

The deafening hum of the metro whizzing past station after station is enough to prevent Steve from talking, because unless he wants to shout over the noise and annoy his fellow travellers into considering homicide, there’s no way he would hear what he’s saying, much less catch Bucky’s response. The only pastime he’s left with is trying not to go round the bend over the ceaseless press of Bucky’s body against his, until they get out at their stop and can walk with at least a shred of distance between each other.

“Christ, we were packed like sardines in there,” Bucky says as they hike up the stairs out of the subway. “Someone grabbed my ass, can you believe that?” he grins like a Cheshire cat, exposing his sharp, pointed canines that give the twinkle of humor in his eye a strangely predatory appearance.

 _No wonder they did_ , Steve stops himself from saying.

“It’s New York, don’t act surprised,” he laughs instead. Bucky concedes the point.

For a couple blocks, they walk in an easy silence, but when they pass an elderly woman decked out in hot pink from head to toe, including her thinning hair dyed to match her outfit, they look to each other out the corner of their eyes, both trying to stifle their laughter in the face of the lady who, frankly, looks a bit terrifying.

Right then, it hits Steve like a brick that he doesn’t know anything about the person strolling next to him, aside from that he works the morning shift in a coffeehouse and is handsome as the devil.

“So, Bucky, what do you do?” Steve asks, hands stuffed in his pockets. He has gloves on this time, but it doesn’t diminish the fact that the temperature must have dipped below fourteen degrees Fahrenheit overnight. “Other than sneaking cookies to unexpecting people, I mean.”

“Ha ha,” Bucky deadpans and goes quiet. Just when Steve contemplates repeating his question, he speaks. “Well, I go to college, if that’s what you wanna know.”

“College?” Steve frowns. “But you don’t look…” He waves his hand vaguely.

“Young enough?” Bucky supplies with a snort. Steve’s cheeks turn beetroot red, the underlying, though thoroughly unintended brassness of what he’s said sinking in. Bucky doesn’t look a day over twenty five, but Steve deems the alternate possibility of him being younger than that improbable. It’s the air he gives out, he thinks defensively. “Thanks a lot.”

“I didn’t mean it like that, I just-” Steve utters, begging the ground to swallow him whole. Bucky cuts into him, laying a hand on his shoulder briefly to shut him up.

“It’s okay, I’m not. I’m twenty six, old as hell.”

Close call.

“Really?” Steve doesn’t know what he’s taken aback by.

“Really. I graduated high school, but after that...” Bucky tenses up minutely, something like uneasiness flashing across his face, but as quickly as it came, it’s gone again, so fast Steve isn’t sure whether he didn’t imagine it. “Something held me up. It stole a couple years from my life, so I only had a chance to start out some time ago.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“What do you study?” Steve inquires further.

“I’m a bioengineering major,” Bucky says. “I’ve always been a nerd, so I thought, that’s something I could see myself doing, you know? Technology and stuff, it’s fascinating. My sister was always a little shit about it when we were little.” He breathes a short laugh.

“You have a sister?” Steve asks. Bucky nods and gets out of the way of a group of rowdy small children led by a kindergarten teacher wrapped in an atrocious knitted scarf. Her dismal expression is implying she’s currently rethinking every decision she’s ever made in her life.

“Three, actually,” Bucky says after they’ve left the kids behind, and Steve huffs in disbelief. He can’t envision living in that big a family, not for the life of him. “But the one I’m talking about, though, her name’s Becca. Two years younger than me.”

“Bucky and Becca?” Steve fights a smile. Bucky mock-glowers at him. It’s both adorable and a little alarming; it gives Steve a guide to how he would look pissed off.

“ _Don’t_ mention it. My nana finds it hysterical enough.”

Steve nudges Bucky with an elbow. “It _is_ funny, you can’t deny it.”

“That’s the problem,” Bucky says, awarding him with a shit-eating grin. “It’s fucking ridiculous, is what it is.”

Were Tony and the other Avengers here, they would probably expect Steve to whack Bucky across the head with a street sign for swearing. What they aren’t keen on accepting is that Steve was in the Army in the goddamn forties, where the language had been far from Shakespearean sonnets-like, leaning more towards Sunday dinner in a brothel.

If anyone was to throw together a dictionary filled with curse words and curse words alone, it would be Steve of all people.

He’ll probably do it out of spite one day anyway.

“Where did you grow up?” Steve asks, though he suspects he already knows the answer; in Bucky’s voice, there is an unmistakable hint of the Brooklyn drawl that Steve’s ear fishes out every time Bucky speaks.

Bucky cracks a fond smile. “Brooklyn, born and raised,” he says proudly, like Steve supposed he would.

Steve lifts a hand. “Up high, me too.” Bucky smacks his palm against Steve’s, a delighted beam stretching his cheeks from ear to ear.

The first time Clint tried to high five him, Steve flinched, convinced he was about to be slapped in the face. When he demanded to know what the hell Clint thought he was doing, Clint realised that when he was busy fist-bumping his peers, Steve had been ‘chilling’ (Natasha has once used the word to refer to Steve’s seventy years under the ice, and shortly received a lifelong ban on doing it again).

Scandalized by Steve’s lack of an idea about modern culture, Clint took it upon himself to dump all of his extensive knowledge on the subject onto Steve. Soon enough, they were greeting each other with the Vulcan salute, to Tony’s continuous wrath.

“And you? You have any siblings?” Bucky asks when they turn the corner and the MET’s majestatic building appears in its full glory before their eyes.

“Nope,” Steve says, popping the ‘p’. Just having him, his mother has worked her fingers to the bone each day to keep the both of them dressed and fed, sometimes only by a stroke of luck. Had he had a brother or sister, Steve might not have been here at all, with how his ma had barely managed to put two dimes together to afford medicine for him when he’d been sick almost every other day.

It’s a miracle he even lived past the age of nine.

“Lucky you,” Bucky says as they climb up the wide steps leading up to the museum’s entry, narrowly missing stepping on the hands of a group of tourists listening to a tour guide in a fascination more often than not found in children enthralled by a bedtime story. “I love my sisters, but they can be a pain in the ass, honestly.” He turns to Steve. “Don’t tell them I said I love them. It would only go to their egos.”

Steve laughs. “I promise I won’t.”

“Good,” Bucky says, shoving him in the side good-naturedly.

As soon as they walk into the museum’s entrance hall, Steve’s jaw drops. His fingers ache for a pencil to portray the grand arches of aged stone, and the tall, slim columns embellished with intricate carvings. The vast room’s lighting is diffusing a honey-colored tint over the floors polished to perfection, and Steve instantly feels warmer from looking around on its own. He’s never seen an interior like that in the flesh.

“It’s incredible in here, isn’t it?” Bucky says, like he’s reading Steve’s mind (though with his mouth parted in elated awe, it doesn’t pose a particular challenge to do so).

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. Bucky crooks an impossibly broad smile again.

Steve is beginning to think that in Bucky’s head, there’s a space designed solely to store smiles, all of them stacked in cupboards, labelled for oddly specific occasions in that squeezed-together, angular handwriting.

Bucky beckons for Steve to follow him. “Come on,” he says, and Steve does.

Together, they pick an exhibition (an extensive collection of modernist prints by an Indian photographer, depicting the nooks and crannies of his homeland), and buy the tickets.

Upon seeing Steve, the ticket office clerk squints in a manner he surely thinks is surreptitious, but to Steve, it’s obvious right away that he’s being gaped at in search for proof that he’s the man wielding the iconic shield.

Steve’s gut clenches at the burning sensation of the man’s gaze sweeping over his body. He hunches slightly, praying in his head for the man to let him go in peace.

Luckily, the universe takes mercy on him; the cashier simply slides the ticket to Steve, speaking only to wish him a pleasant visit. Steve smiles tightly and escapes from the man’s vicinity, letting out a breath of relief, the ticket gripped in hand like a trophy.

Sometimes confrontations with ‘fans’ are enjoyable enough, but in overview, Steve prefers to go unnoticed, or at least unrecognised.

“You ready?” Bucky asks. Steve nods, and they go on exploring.

 

* * *

 

After their trip to the MET, which went on and on until Bucky looked down at his wristwatch and registered with trepidation how horribly late he was running to a morning lecture, Steve sees his new friend practically every day for the best part of three weeks (with the exception of when Steve’s away on a mission, which, to be fair, has been fairly rare lately).

Taking into account how often they meet, Steve sometimes worries that Bucky might soon a) fail all of his classes, b) get fired. So far, though, both his education and his job seem to be secure.

Many a time, Steve and Bucky’s meeting point is The Yellow Bowtie, but on occasion, they make to get together someplace else. Bucky takes Steve to venues he would never have thought of or even known about himself, constantly egging Steve on to taste dubious street food or to spend his money on meaningless but pretty knick-knacks, and Steve has fun like he hasn’t experienced since he was little and careless.

With each November morning they pass in each other’s company, Steve grows more enchanted with Bucky - with how he throws his head back when he laughs particularly hard, how he looks in dress shirts, how he can go from impish to demure in a matter of seconds. How when he counts his change, he arranges the coins in size order in his hand, or how he sticks the very tip of his tongue out when he’s deeply focused.

But Steve doesn’t dare to voice his helpless infatuation. The bond between them is fragile still, and if Bucky rejects him, it would be too easy for him to walk away. If Bucky left him behind, Steve wouldn’t bear it, so he stays quiet, enjoying the hours he gets to spend with him, basking in the glow of his person.

Now, when Steve sets foot into the coffeeshop on a cloudy morning a handful of days prior to Thanksgiving, as agreed when they last parted, Bucky is leaning back against the counter with his front to Steve, already clad in his black coat that’s hanging open around his frame. He doesn’t notice Steve coming in - his head is bent over a thick book held in one hand, and it takes a tap to the shoulder for him to look up.

“What you reading?” Steve asks in lieu of a hello. Bucky holds up the thick volume, still open on a glossy, dog-eared page. Steve skims his eyes over the text; the neat columns of verbs make it out to be a French textbook.

“I’ve got a student exchange in my second semester,” Bucky says before Steve can ask. “I figured I should at least know the basics, not look like a dumbass.”

“And that’s how you’re gonna do it?” Steve leafs through the textbook. Selected fragments of information are underlined with a neon yellow highlighter, and there are wrinkled lines in some of the bottom corners, indicating that they used to be bent to mark a page where Bucky has left off, and straightened out again. “By reading a manual?”

Bucky folds his arms across his chest. “How would you rather I do it, then?”

“I know French,” Steve says, giving Bucky back his book for him to push it into his backpack. “I could teach you.”

“You speak French?” Bucky says curiously, as though Steve didn’t say it. He zips up the backpack and hooks it back around one of his shoulders, the black wool of his coat bunching up under the strap. He pulls at the fabric to smooth it out.

“So it happens,” Steve says.

“And you would teach me?”

Steve shrugs. _Why not?_ “I said so, didn’t I?”

Bucky appears to briefly think it through, and he smirks, the mischief gleaming in the vivid blue of his irises sparking a fearful anticipation in Steve. Usually when Bucky gets that look in his eye, it’s right before he dares Steve to do something beyond stupid.

“Say something in French, then, Mr Frenchman,” he pokes Steve’s arm, and Steve snorts.

He sobers up when he becomes aware that Bucky isn’t letting up, instead staring at him expectantly with his bottom lip trapped between his teeth.

Steve cleans his throat.

Bucky is so captivating right there, standing opposite Steve in his pale blue sweater under his coat, with that dishevelled head of hair that makes him look like he just got out of bed, where he’s been up to activities of a wildly unspecified nature, that Steve physically _hurts_.

He tucks his thumbs into the belt loops of his jeans, not trusting himself enough to leave his hands hanging freely by his sides. His fingers are quivering, wanting to reach out and touch, and he feels a tingling, a flame, underneath his skin, of sheer need to press his lips to Bucky’s and kiss his smugness away.

In a frenzy, Steve grasps at the one sentence he can think of forming.

“J’aimerais tellement t'embrasser,” he blurts out. Bucky laughs, loud and bubbly, not a clue in the world about the meaning of what was confessed to him.

“What does it mean?” he queries.

_I wish I could kiss you._

Steve forces out a chuckle. It comes out parched, dry. “I guess you’ll never know.”

“Asshole,” Bucky says. “Hang on a sec, will ya.” He pats down his pockets and when he doesn’t find the thing he expected to, he runs a hand through his hair.

“Shit, I think I left my phone in the back room,” he says. He points to the door emblazoned with the words _STAFF ONLY_ with his thumb. “Mind if I go grab it?”

Steve extends a hand towards the door. “Go on.”

Bucky spins on his heel and strides away, the door closing after him when he enters the room.

Steve, not eager on twiddling his thumbs, goes to get coffees for himself and Bucky; he remembers that Bucky has a weakness for lattes from the one time they had to duck into the nearest restaurant to flee from a rainstorm. The morning is shaping up to be the start to an exceptionally cold day, and something to keep the two of them nice and toasty, at least for a couple of minutes, will come in handy.

The employee presently standing ground at the register is Hollie, the girl with whose name one of the coffeeshop’s plants is branded with. Her tight curls are gathered into a messy ponytail on top of her head, and she makes do to look radiant and well-rested in contempt of it being so early in the day.

Throughout the last three weeks, Steve’s made somewhat of a friend of her.

“Hey, Steve?” she says tentatively when he pays. He’s convinced her to call him by his first name, and though she was reluctant at first, she adapted fast.

“Yes?” Steve says, and frowns, because Hollie’s normally bright face is contorted with worry, and she is never troubled, not even at half past seven AM when she got a mere two hours of sleep the night before. “Is something wrong?”

Hollie’s golden hoop earrings sway as she shakes her head. “No, it’s...” She tucks a runaway strand of hair behind her ear, opening then closing her mouth. “I’m sorry, but I, uh. I speak French because my dad is from Quebec and I, I overheard what you said to James.”

Steve’s blood runs cold in his veins.

“You did?” he says, quiet. His heart is hammering in his ears all of a sudden.

What if she tells Bucky? She’s closer to him than any of their colleagues are (Steve knows because Bucky’s told him over bagels), and _God_ , what if she _tells_ him? He’s not prepared to have Bucky let go of him. He might never be.

“I’m not going to say anything,” she says quickly, outrunning a fit of panic threatening to wash over Steve. “But I…” She hesitates.

“You…?” Steve nudges her on, growing paranoid.

She thumbs at her delicate necklace. “Well, not that’s any of my business, but…” She looks up at Steve gravely, her dark eyes wide. “Steve… Do something before it’s too late. Before your chance passes and you regret not taking it.”

For a while, Steve is rendered speechless.

“Yeah. Okay,” he says hoarsely when he regains his ability to speak.

For all he knows, Hollie might be right. Perhaps he should risk the plunge, and maybe, just maybe, the water he thought to be bone-chilling will prove to be warm.

He’s not quite ready to dive in, though. Not yet. Someday.

“Okay,” he repeats, and Hollie smiles, her cheek dipping to showcase her dimple.

“I’m rooting for you,” she says softly. Seeing Bucky emerge from the back room, she gives Steve one last meaningful look, and taps a combination of keys on the cashbox.

“Your order will be ready in no time,” Hollie amplifies her voice as Bucky nears, and she turns away to prepare their drinks, allowing a tall, lanky co-worker Steve recalls is named Andrew to replace her in her duty of serving the long line of coffee-hungry customers.

“Got what you needed?” Steve says when Bucky comes to a stop beside him. In reply, Bucky waves his phone in the air in triumph; he has the exact same model of iPhone Thor has accidentally crushed beneath his fingers while Bruce strained to teach him how to use it.

Needless to say, no one let Thor get a hand on a phone since.

“And you?” Bucky says, sliding the battered phone into the pocket of his coat.

Steve inclines his head towards Hollie in her apron, foaming milk. “I’m in the process.”

Bucky beams. “You get me a latte?”

“Mhm.”

“You’re a champ, Stevie,” Bucky says, squeezing Steve’s shoulder. Steve’s pulse jumps in exhilaration, both at the nickname and the effortless touch.

“One latte, one Americano to go!” Hollie calls out, and Steve ambles over to collect their coffees, regretfully sliding out from under Bucky’s hand.

Hollie smiles when Steve balances the cups he takes from her in one hand and reaches into the box of sugar packets with the other. He doesn’t sweeten his coffee, and she knows it. They’re both aware, though, of a certain someone’s horrible case of sweet tooth.

“I’ll see you around,” Hollie says knowingly, the timbre of her voice benign as a lullaby. Steve can’t picture Hollie being clamorous; not unlike a fairy, she has an aura of cheerful but stoic calm, and even when she shouts over the coffeehouse’s buzz, it sounds like a whisper someone has turned up to be louder.

“Where are we going?” Bucky asks, mixing sugar into his coffee with a wooden stirrer after they’ve exitted the café.

“We’re going to a magical place called ‘the library’ to teach you French properly,” Steve says and leans over the curb to hail an oncoming cab.

“Oh, come on!” Bucky whines. “You gonna go all professor on me?”

Turning to face Bucky, Steve grins. “I’m afraid so.” His eyes can’t help but snag on the way the displeased Bucky’s tongue licks the stirrer clean of foam.

Steve shakes his head to clear it, opening the door for Bucky as the yellow Toyota pulls over.

“I have classes well into the afternoon today, you ass, obviously you gotta go on tormenting me,” Bucky grumbles, but climbs into the car.

 

* * *

 

“No, no, a glass is a ‘he’,” Steve points to a mistake in Bucky’s notebook. “‘Un verre’, a glass. ‘Le verre’, the glass.”

“The fuck does a glass need a gender for,” Bucky mutters, crossing a word out deliberately with his pen.

“A bottle is a ‘she’,” Steve explains. “‘Une bouteille’.”

Bucky freezes with his eyes fixed on his notes, pen held out in one hand like a baton. “Repeat the pronouns. The ones starting with ‘u’.”

“Un and une?”

“Yeah. Do you put the, like, accent thingy above the ‘u’ in the second one?”

“No, you add an ‘e’ at the end.”

“An ‘e’? So the entire way of how you pronounce a word can be changed by a letter that’s on the entirely other end of it?”

“Basically, yeah.”

Bucky’s face is a picture of horrified bewilderment. “What kind of a shitty language is this?”

Steve laughs. “Hold your horses, we’re only getting started. Now, the verbs.”

Bucky drops his head onto the table and bangs his forehead against the wood. “I don’t wanna do this anymore,” he groans.

“Suck it up, pal,” Steve says and goes on. “So, there are three patterns of conjugating a verb, depending on the suffix.” He ignores the pained look Bucky gives him. “All of those patterns vary when you change the tense.”

Except for a quiet, “What the hell...?”, Bucky is silent.

“Plus, of course, tons of exceptions to the rule,” Steve adds.

Bucky looks over what he’s written so far. “I hate the French so much right now, with their fucking baguettes,” he mumbles, and Steve bites down on a chuckle.

“Write this down, I’ll conjugate ‘to love’ for you,” he says and proceeds to make good on his promise, because he has no sense of self-preservation.

“You got it?” he asks after he’s finished.

Bucky is staring at him, bemused, mouth turned down at the corners. His pen is lying untouched next to his hand. He’s so endearingly confused, Steve is dying to whip out the StarkPhone Tony has equipped him with and snap a picture to put on his bedside table. ‘Who is that?’ the people would ask. ‘A guy I’m head over heels with, but he doesn’t know it,’ Steve would respond.

“How in hell do you spell these,” Bucky says incredulously. “It all sounds exactly the same.” Following a moment of thought, he snaps his notebook shut, throws it into his backpack and gets up, his chair scraping against the blue carpeting.

“Get your ass up,” he commands and pulls Steve’s chair back. Steve lurches up for his nose not to have an up-close encounter with the the shiny stain on the floor that looks disturbingly unlike strawberry jam.

“We’re gonna do the best thing you can think of doing in a public library,” Bucky says, walking backwards, away from the tables occupied by students snoozing over their assigned readings.

“Which is?” Steve says, joining Bucky’s march into the labyrinth of bookshelves, jacket in hand. _Because I’m all in if you mean groping in the Foreign Literature aisle._

“Oh, you’ll see,” Bucky laughs and spins around to lead the way to what turns out to be the Romance Novel section of all things.

“What exactly are you planning on us doing?” Steve asks once Bucky is immersed in rummaging through the shelves. He’s not interested in making origami out of badly written sex scenes, no matter how appealing Bucky might make that out to be. Call him old, but he has a respect for books, nevermind if they’re a literary masterpiece or something you’d rather use as a rag than read before bed.

Though if it meant he’d get a kiss from Bucky, he would fold all pages of _The Great Gatsby_ into different species of origami monkeys. Capuchin for a peck on the lips, macaque for a little tongue.

A goddamn gorilla to get himself together.

“We,” Bucky says, pulling a thick paperback out from a row of novels, “are going to find the shittiest romance ever written and make fun of it.” He waves his prize in front of Steve’s face; its cover is brandished with a risquély arched woman lacking in clothing, and a title in an unreadable, hideous red cursive that gives Steve an instant headache.

“What on Earth is this,” Steve can’t help his laugh. Flipping through the book, Bucky is in seventh heaven.

“An eyesore, isn’t it?” he says, thrilled. He sits down, cross-legged, on the floor, propping his backpack against the shelves like a pillow, and pats the spot next to him. Steve obeys and sits down, stretches his legs across the narrow passage so his feet are touching the opposite shelf.

Bucky opens the book on random and scans the page, looking for a hilariously bad, juicy subsection to read out loud.

“Oh sweet Jesus,” he says, “listen to this.” He clears his throat and starts reading in a purposefully exaggerated smooth voice of a narrator, trying his best to be British, and that in itself makes Steve snort a laugh. “ _Resembling a curtain of sunlight, Alexandra’s thick locks flowed down her opalescent shoulders white like the feathers of a holy dove, sparkling with droplets of water clinging to the honey-colored strands like liquid pearls._ ”

Steve lets out a snigger. Bucky reads on.

_“Concupiscence coiled in Frank’s stomach akin to a furious snake at the sight of her plump lips closing in a cherry-red ring around her finger as she licked it like a lollipop to turn the page of a leather-bound tome, her loquacious person now quiet while she read, her swan-like neck bent in a meritorious arch of snowy skin begging to be marked with the purple stains of passion.”_

By the time Bucky is done with the paragraph, Steve has tears of laughter pooling at the corners of his eyes. To some extent, it’s the book’s contents that’s making him lose his marbles, but for the most part, it’s Bucky’s overzealous gesturing that does the trick - he’s waving his hand around like a crotchety grandfather from an Italian soap opera, fingers cupped together, and his awful impersonation of an accent doesn’t help his cause.

“Purple stains of passion,” Steve wheezes, clutching his sides. “Oh, Christ.”

“A furious snake!” Bucky wipes at his own eyes. “What happens with it during sex? Does it participate? Maybe it vibrates? Like, you tickle the head and get a waterproof Jack Rabbit?”

Steve gulps air like a goldfish; his windpipe is tight from the laughter, making speaking nearly impossible. “Stop it, stop!” he chokes out. “Give me that book, you’re gonna kill me!” he says and lunges at Bucky, but he holds the novel out of Steve’s reach before Steve can grab it, keeping him back with a surprisingly strong hand on his chest.

“Get off, you heathen!” Bucky hisses with his abhorrent British accent that sounds more like a Scot with laryngitis than a dainty dweller of the Buckingham Palace, and Steve takes another swipe at the book. In the last second, however, the hand he’s using to support his weight slips on the carpet and he loses his balance, falling on top of Bucky, pushing a muffled “Umph!” out of both of them.

“God, Steve, ease up on the cookies in the future, will you,” Bucky croaks from underneath him, which is ironic, considering that he’s the one who’s been feeding him more sugar than a person needs.

Steve pushes himself up not to crush Bucky to bits, but before he sits back fully, he notes how…

...close…

...Bucky’s…

...face…

...is.

Bucky catches his gaze, and all words die at Steve’s lips as Bucky’s eyes bore into his, wide and inquiring, making Steve’s heartbeat stop and quicken all at once.

“What,” Bucky whispers, regardless of how he didn’t bother to keep it down seconds ago. Steve relishes in the roughness of his voice in the library’s precipitous, overwhelming silence that leaves Steve with no incentives but Bucky’s irises and the steady rise and fall of his chest beneath Steve’s.

“Nothing,” Steve rasps back, swallowing the ball at the back of his throat. The anomalous grey-blue of Bucky’s eyes is shining under the library’s artificial lights.

Steve wonders how Bucky’s dark eyelashes would throw a trembling shadow over his cheeks if Bucky closed those eyes and let himself be kissed.

Licking his mouth, Bucky glances down to Steve’s lips, returning to his eyes almost instantly.

His lower lip is left glistening with moisture.

Steve feels himself leaning in, like he’s a puppet on a string, watching himself from afar in slow-motion. Bucky’s lips part, a tiny breath escaping the gap, ghosting across Steve’s face, and his fingers twitch where they’re still resting on Steve’s chest.

He doesn’t look away. He doesn’t stir.

Until someone’s footsteps thump around the corner and he jumps away as though burned.

“You guys havin' a good time?” the person snickers. Hurriedly, Steve sits up, flattening his shirt, sparing no effort at avoiding Bucky’s eye.

“Yeah, uh, we’re great,” Steve mumbles, fidgeting with his collar. Bucky, already standing, offers him a hand, and Steve winces slightly but takes it, patting the wrinkles out of his pants when Bucky pulls him up.

“I’m here for a book.” The stranger, a tall, black guy in a light wash denim jacket thrown over a sweatshirt, gives Steve a suggestive look as he passes him.

“You’d figure, in a library,” Bucky laughs weakly. The guy agrees with a chuckle and goes his way, down the aisle and left to the Philosophy branch.

They stand in a tense stillness, so different in energy from the one coating them like a blanket minutes ago, but then Bucky speaks. “I should probably go. I, um.” He pulls his sleeve back to take a look at his watch. “I have class in half an hour.”

“Yeah,” Steve says quietly. His head is a mess of knotted thoughts running back and forth, swallowing each other’s tails, screeching _what did you think you were doing?!_ into his ear over and over in a loop.

Bucky, in all probability, has a beautiful, long-haired girlfriend with a wholesome American name, like Monica or Heather, who lives with him in a New York equivalent of a brick cottage with a picket fence painted white, and who would Steve be to catch him by surprise with a kiss him like that? He’d be a clueless asshole, that’s who.

Bucky can’t be homophobic - Steve has seen him heartily congratulate two men when he noticed a visibly expensive ring on one’s finger - but Steve thinks it only dependable that there’s someone the like of Heather existing in Bucky’s normality, a girl he comes home to after a day of classes who kisses his fatigue away.

Had Steve put his lips on him, Bucky would most likely have wiped his mouth and agreed to never speak of it again, because he’s a good friend and Steve is nothing but a moron for coming so close to ruining all Bucky sees fit to give him, to shattering the soft happiness that makes the coldest November morning feel like the very first day of summer.

“Go, Buck, you don’t wanna be late,” Steve says, and Bucky smiles.

“Get a move-on, then, I’m not walking myself outside,” he says. A seed of hope blooms in Steve’s chest - maybe he hasn’t royally fucked up, after all.

He grabs his jacket from the floor and trails alongside Bucky out of the library. On their way out, they pass the guy who’s walked in on them (so to speak); he waves at them, sending an overemphasised wink over his stack of research.

Steve escorts Bucky all the way to the nearest subway station, and stops at the mouth of its entrance.

Bucky pauses on the stairs, four steps below Steve, remembering Steve isn’t intending on treading underground at his heels. He jogs back up the steps so he’s facing Steve again and puts a bracing hand on Steve’s shoulder.

He’s wearing dark green gloves embroidered with little trees.

“See you tomorrow?” he says. The sapling in Steve’s heart sprouts a flower.

“Yeah,” Steve smiles. “Can’t wait.”

Bucky squeezes his shoulder like he’s made a habit, and graces Steve with a sparkling smile. “Me, too,” he says and turns around, running back down the stairs.

Scuffing his toe into a crack in the pavement, Steve watches him go, and it’s only when Bucky vanishes into the overflowing mass of people that he walks away.

 

* * *

 

Thanksgiving comes and goes in a whirl of precipitance and wreaths of orange leaves and rowanberries on every door.

Thursday afternoon has the Avengers spilling into Sam’s mother’s tiny but homey apartment on the Bronx for an annual Thanksgiving Dinner At Darlene’s. The place nearly bursts at the seams hosting all of them at once.

Like every year, they overstay into the late hours of the night, which Mrs Wilson doesn’t mind in the least. On the contrary, she protests every time someone pipes up with a “We better get going”, bribing them all into staying a while longer with another helping of her famous pecan pie, until Sam has to step in at half past two and convince his mother that she ought to turn in for the day.

They fight to unglue a cooing Natasha, who’s had one glass of wine too much, from Darlene’s purring white cat, and go home with full bellies and faces hurting from hours of laughter, stumbling to the subway under the winter’s first snow falling from the night sky.

 

* * *

 

Steve comes to The Yellow Bowtie the first morning of December to find Bucky on a ladder at the storefront, hanging Christmas lights above the windowpanes, doing a surprisingly lovely job of singing along to _All I Want For Christmas Is You_ blasting from a street dancer’s iPod.

“I didn’t know you could sing so well,” Steve asks without any other greeting, judging it a dire mistake when Bucky swivels around so quickly his ladder topples. In time, Steve grips it before it can fall over, which combined with Bucky’s desperate latch onto the window frame, works to prevent Bucky from bruising his fabulous ass.

“Are you okay?” Steve asks, still holding onto the ladder.

Bucky laughs. “I thought I was gonna die, but yeah.”

Steve catches Hollie’s eye across the glass. She’s looking up at them with concern, her hand hovering in midair, holding a dirty plate halfway to the tray she’s gripping. When Steve gives her a cheesy wave, her face folds into her signature smile and she shakes her fair head. Through the window, he can make out that she’s laughing before she gets her tray in order and makes a swift departure into the depths of the coffeehouse.

“So, what are you doing?” Steve asks once Hollie vanishes into the back room and he turns to Bucky still standing on the ladder, a roll of gaffer tape in his hand.

Bucky attaches the last of the string of lights to the window frame and climbs down. “The inside is all done up, and I wanted to contribute. So here I am, fighting for my life in Manhattan.” As he folds the ladder down, Mariah Carey’s soprano fades out and the song changes to _Last Christmas_.

“Oh, I love this one,” Steve says when the first notes hit his ear.

His first Christmas out of the ice, he’s gotten George Michael stuck in his head, all because of Nat and her seasonal playlist playing on repeat every waking minute of December. Once she’s heard Steve hum under his breath at breakfast, she wouldn’t hear the end of it. (Thor’s joined Steve’s performance once, though as they were all later informed, he strongly favoured Michael Bublé.)

Bucky’s widens his eyes and scrunches up his eyebrows at once. It’s sort of funny, how wide his range of facial expressions is.

“Are you telling me,” he says with a feigned calm, “that you are on Team _Last Christmas_?”

“Uh,” Steve replies eloquently. “I don’t know what you mean, but sure.”

“Steve, oh my _God_ ,” Bucky shakes his head. “Hold on,” he commands and with a polite “Excuse me”, he steps in front of two young Asian women in similar trench coats walking by. They stop, looking up at Bucky with confusion. One of them, dressed in a caramel-colored coat, clutches her red leather handbag closer to herself, while the other, clad in light blue, tightens her hold on her friend’s elbow.

Steve cringes inwardly; he despises how the automatic reaction to a man stopping a woman on the street is her assuming a protective stance.

“Yes?” the girl with the red bag says, eyes flitting from Bucky to Steve and back.

“Hello, ladies,” Bucky says and sends them his best award-winning smile. Entertained, Steve rolls his eyes; Bucky flirts with everything in a skirt, from giggling college girls on the Staten Island ferry to the Mexican street vendor who, utterly charmed by Bucky, confessed she blew out the candles on her seventy fifth birthday cake in last year’s July. “If you had to pick, would you say you prefer _All I Want For Christmas Is You_ or _Last Christmas_? It’s a social experiment.”

The girl in the camel coat brushes her black bangs out of her eyes, smiling coyly. “ _All I Want For Christmas_ would be the one.”

“Attagirl!” Bucky beams at her. “And you, ma’am?” He directs his attention to the other woman, who let the fingers of her gloved hand loosen in the meantime. She brightens, too, and Steve figures the girls must be sisters or otherwise related, because their smiles are like two peas in a pod; rounded cupid’s bows, slightly crooked front teeth.

“I’m afraid I’m on the same page,” she says.

Bucky grins, the cat who got the cream. “Thank you so much, have a great day!” he says, and the women walk away in a hurry. One of them ducks her head, a rosy blush high on her pale cheeks, and her companion elbows her in the side playfully, giggling at the color in her face. Steve shakes his head as Bucky turns back to him, glowing with triumph.

“See?” Bucky jabs his thumb at their retreating figures. “They get it!”

Steve laughs. “Pal, I’d get quantum physics if a stranger who stopped me on the street had eyes half as nice as yours.”

What a great opportunity for Steve to rediscover his lack of brain-to-mouth filter.

But Bucky doesn’t question him, looking at Steve a nanosecond longer than necessary, possibly checking for any bumps on his forehead that might insinuate that he’s suffered a concussion (because that’s the one plausible fucking explanation for what he said, besides the one and only ‘I want to have your children’), and claps him on the back with a shameless grin. “Thanks. And quantum physics isn’t that hard, once you’ve sat down with it,” he jokes as his response, and Steve doesn’t know whether he wants to take a breath of relief or _die_.

“You ready for some skating?” Bucky adds before Steve can delve into reflecting on his options further. Of course, Steve has promised him ages ago that they would go one day, and now apparently is the appropriate time to go make a clown of himself on ice.

Steve’s spent seventy years _under_ it, but he’s never in his life been _on_ it, which would be humorous if he weren’t expected to skate arm in arm with someone who, if he’s to be believed, which he is, has played ice hockey with his dad ever since he was six. And who, incidentally, is also the person who possesses the ability of making Steve weak in the knees with one touch.

The world really hates him, huh.

“You bet I am,” he says regardless, and while Bucky goes to put the ladder away into the storeroom, Steve drops a ten dollar bill into the bowler hat the street dancer has put out, just because he can.

 

* * *

 

“Buck, please, I’ve had enough,” Steve whines, glaring up at Bucky who’s cackling at his misery, crouched over him with his hands on his knees. He looks like a winter angel with his flushed cheeks and rented skates that seem to be like a regular pair of shoes to him, based on how adeptly he slides around the rink without a care in the world.

“Get up, you big baby,” Bucky pokes fun at him with no trace of remorse. Steve pouts. The thin layer of frost sprinkled over the ice is melting, seeping through his pants, and his ass hurts from repeatedly hitting the ground.

“I don’t like you,” Steve says. Bucky laughs, bright and rippling, making Steve’s chest tighten - to his moonstruck ears, the sound of Bucky’s joy is like molten gold.

Steve strives to extract it from him as often as humanly possible.

“Sure you don’t,” Bucky says, his eyes crinkling at the corners, and extends both his hands to Steve. “Come on, up you get.”

Who is Steve to resist him?

He grabs on to the offered help.

When Bucky heaves him up, for the upteenth time grousing about Steve’s weight, a gleam of silver flashes around Bucky’s neck and a thin chain slips out from under the collar of his crewneck, dangling right in front of Steve’s nose.

The chain has two rectangles of stainless steel attached to it; Steve would recognize the shape anywhere, even in the middle of the night with his eyes blindfolded.

Dog tags.

“You served?” Steve asks, voice low, dusting his backside off of snow. The cheer fades from Bucky’s face when the question hits him.

Steve wishes he didn’t ask.

Bucky visibly swallows, drops his gaze to his feet. “Yeah,” he says in a near-whisper, and Steve has to step closer to hear him. “Afghanistan.” Bucky looks up. “After I came home, I couldn’t pick myself up for over a year. Didn’t leave the house for four months. My parents thought I was a lost cause.” His eyes are raw, shrouded in nightmares of the past, their mirth replaced by fearful bitterness.

Steve aches for him; for the gore he’ll never be able to quite wipe from under his eyelids, for the nights he wakes up screaming in his own home, for the flashes of terror when he mistakes a bottle abandoned on the sidewalk for an IED.

For all the minutes, hours, days ripped from him by the claws of war ghosting over his spine.

“I’m sorry,” Steve whispers. Bucky shakes his head.

“It’s okay.”

He’s silent after that, bracing himself for saying something else. Steve lets him get ready, unmoving in the middle of the rink filled with frolicking children and blithe packs of adults killing time before sitting down in front of a monitor for the day.

“You know, I…” Bucky inhales. Exhales. Inhales again. “I’m not proud of it. Really. It’s just, at the time, I was a stupid kid. I thought it was the right thing to do, joining the troops. And now I know it was not. I lost a decent chunk of time for doing a real shitty thing, and I feel like a right dickhead for it.”

Steve nods silently. “That's understandable.” His arm itches to provide Bucky some comfort, to ease his obvious pain.

Steve’s attitude towards the Army has always been of a scathing nature. He wanted to go overseas to give Nazis what they deserved - a steel-toed boot to the groin and a mouthful of gunpowder. Becoming a propaganda tool for justifying the excessively fiendish military decisions everyone could have gone fine without was decidedly not what he ever bargained for.

Steve relents by putting his hand on Bucky’s shoulder, rubbing tiny circles into the black wool of Bucky’s coat with his thumb. He pours all the compassion his body contains into the motion, determined to bring the smile back to Bucky’s face.

One corner of Bucky’s mouth twitches upwards a little; for now, Steve calls it a success.

“War’s a terrible thing,” Bucky says. Steve couldn’t agree more. “Though I figure you already know that from experience.”

Bucky meets his eye straight on, anticipating Steve’s reply, and that’s when Steve understands.

Bucky knows. Bucky knows he’s Captain America. He knows Steve’s absurd glasses are a disguise, knows where all the knicks and cuts on Steve’s face and hands that he doesn’t ask about come from.

“Since when have you known?” is the thing Steve finds in himself to utter.

Bucky smiles, faint but undeniably there. “Around the second time I saw you in the coffeeshop.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

Steve can’t unravel it, why Bucky hasn’t once mentioned the shield if he was aware all along that its owner was right next to him.

Bucky shrugs with one shoulder. “Because you’re a person. You deserve to be treated like one,” he says. “Even if you’re built like a damn tank.” The grin is back in its rightful place, if still a little dimmed.

Steve shows his teeth in a wide smile, too, because isn’t _that_ the approach he’s forlornly desired from anyone since 1943, to see him for who he is under the striking exterior fabricated in a lab.

“Thank you,” he says, an enormous wave of loving gratitude for the man standing in front of him in skates flooding his body. Bucky smiles broader.

A group of kindergarten children nearby are playing tag, to their parents’ anguish, and a dark-skinned little boy almost bumps into Steve’s leg, hauled away by his fatigued mother at the last minute. She gives Steve an apologetic look as she skates away; Steve smiles at her, mouthing ‘Don’t worry’ to reassure her.

“Wanna get a hot chocolate?” Bucky proposes, and Steve laughs.

“You know what? I’m dying for some.”

 

* * *

 

“If any of you jackasses drop my favorite one, the little ballerina, you’re all going to die,” Natasha shouts over Frank Sinatra’s deep cajoling soaking from the invisible speakers built into the ceiling. She’s squatting by a cupboard in the shared pantry, hunting for the mint cookies she can’t resist once Christmas comes around the corner, but still, she knows that Clint and Thor are horsing around with the baubles, throwing them between themselves like tiny glass basketballs.

All of the Avengers are gathered in the common room, lured down by Pepper’s voice in the speaker of Tony’s mobile promising them a surprise. The shocker transpired to be a lush, eight-foot-tall spruce bathing its perimeter in the invigorating aroma of resin; Pepper coaxed them into decorating it and ‘integrating’, before sending through a kiss for Tony and ending the call, running off to sit in a business meeting.

That’s why Steve is settled on one of the leather couches in a reindeer sweater he’s cruelly been forced into, yanking at jumbled cords, giving his all to drawing out the seemingly endless string of white lights meant to go on the tree.

“How are the lights going?” Bruce calls over as Steve wrenches the string out of the cardboard box, closely avoiding knocking himself on the nose when the twisted wire gives in and he flies backwards with no resistance.

“Oh, they’re _splendid_ ,” Steve grunts, kicking the box away, and stands up to go ahead with wrapping the lights around the spruce’s verdant branches, while the others ransack the dozens of cartons filled to the brim with ornaments Pepper must have conjured out of thin air with a snap of her miraculous fingers, because Steve’s never seen them around the Tower before.

Tony sidles up to him with a can of fake snow when Steve stretches out to drape the string over the very top of the tree, catching needles in the weaving of his sweater.

“So, Cap,” Tony says, the ominous rattle of the can accompanying his words like a drum from the craft store. Steve twists on his three-step ladder to look down on him with a frown, response already forming at his lips. _No, Tony, I’m not letting your fake snow anywhere near my face because you want to see how I will look when I’m old._

“Spill the beans,” Tony adds instead of asking for permission to dust Steve’s hair white, and Steve’s grimace deepens.

“What?” he snaps. Has Tony had a headstart on the Christmas punch? He doesn’t look to have touched any bottle apart from the apple juice standing open on the kitchen counter, asking to be spilled, but one never knows with him. He could be stinking drunk and not a soul would realize that he’s drained half of Natasha’s secret liquor stash.

Tony tosses his godforsaken can from one hand to the other, the sharp glint in his eye advocating for Pepper’s capability of persuading her boyfriend to stay clear of permilles. “Share the secret,” Tony says, and Steve starts to worry for him. “Who’s been making you so giddy lately?”

Oh.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Steve mutters, stubbornly shifting his attention to the Christmas tree. He’s stealing time, because Tony is stupid in the no-social-tact kind of way, but he’s not _dumb_. Plus, his nosiness charts shoot through the roof, and he won’t lay off Steve until he has a fat binder of data on Bucky. A tangible, color-coordinated one, he’s dramatic like that.

“Gah. Let it out, Capsicle,” Tony whines, according to prediction. “I haven’t seen you so smiley since, let’s see, ever.” He throws his arm up, waves his hand. “Come on, people, back me up here!” he exclaims to the room at large. Steve looks about; everyone’s putting on a show of pretending to admire the handiwork on the baubles, but each pair of ears is perking up.

_Traitors._

“It’s true, man,” Sam says with a shrug. Natasha nods behind him, the severity of her face unperturbed by the fact that she’s feasting on cookies straight from the packaging adorned with little fuzzy bears.

Hers have orange bows on their heads - Bucky is partial to the flavour whose bears sport lime green ones.

“Okay, fine,” Steve heaves a groan, hopping down from the ladder. It’s a matter of time they know; if he doesn’t confess, they will find out for themselves. He’s got the misfortune of being friends with a bunch of spies, literal and figurative. It must say something about him.

Sam claps him on the shoulder as they all shuffle to sprawl out on the couches. “So, who’s the lucky lady?”

Apparently, there’s also _that_ to be taken care of.

Steve sits and leans back, pressing into the headboard. He crosses his arms over his chest and, tucking his hands into his armpits, he lets out a sigh.

“Yeah, about that,” he says, picking at the expanse of maroon wool under his fingers. He can’t withhold scraps of the past century from flashing in front of his eyes like sepia-toned pictures someone is shuffling too fast to take a proper look at; the bruised fists, the words starting with the letter ‘f’ cutting the air like shrapnel. The blood dripping down chins like red tears.

But that’s part of a photo album no one wants to keep on their bookshelf. This millennium, the two in the lead of the four digits, it’s a fresh start, an opportunity for an old camera’s shutter to click in a new ambiance.

Steve takes a deep breath. Everyone is gaping at him with varying levels of excitement, the wonted crooning of Bing Crosby serving as a soundtrack of sorts.

He takes the dive.

“It’s not a lady.”

Silence. Complete and utter loss of signal.

“Huh,” Tony is the first to break the stunned hush of the room.

“What?” Steve’s fight or flight instinct tingles, compelling him into taking up a defensively harsh tone. Old habits die hard.

Tony raises his hands above his head in a gesture of surrender. “Nothing. I just never suspected the world’s oldest boy scout to play for the other team.”

“I play for both, if you want to put it like that,” Steve says coolly, nose high up in the air. If it means he will checkmate Tony, his insolence levels skyrocket on command.

“That’s so cool, man!” Clint interrupts the stare-down with his enthusiasm, reaching out for a fistbump. Steve obliges with a smile; Clint can always be trusted to blight any animosity vibrating through the room.

Steve hasn’t expected his team to be so casual about the announcement; no one’s face is distorted with disgust, worry, or any sign of mental distress at all. Of course, he hasn’t been awaiting a riot, but he would never have hoped for his confession to be waved aside like an offering of soda. It feels bizzare, how easily they acknowledge the thing he’s been worrying sick over telling them about.

“So.” Natasha reclines into her corner of the sofa, chasing after a broken-off piece of cookie hiding from her in the box. “What’s he like?”

Thor inches closer across the carpet in his sweater matching Steve’s. He has a smudge of stray glitter above his eyebrow, and if Steve didn’t know, he would not believe he’s a Norse god capable of making thunder play to his fancy. “I will extract every detail from you, Captain.”

Steve’s mouth curves into a compulsory smile at the thought of Bucky attempting to stuff an entire donut into his mouth at once, and promptly shouting a smothered ‘Fuck yeah!’ when he succeeded. “He’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”

Upon Sam’s exaggerated ‘Aww’, Steve takes a swipe at his arm. His victim dodges the blow with a guffaw.

“I’m being honest,” Steve laughs. “He’s got the prettiest eyes in the world, and his smile? Brighter than the sun, I’m telling you.”

“Have you dicked him down yet?” Tony chips in, undignified, and the urge to feed him the Christmas lights comes charging back into Steve’s bloodstream doubled. In a wordless show of agreement with Steve, Bruce rolls his eyes in aggravation from his spot at the foot of the couch.

“From your face, I judge you haven’t,” Tony continues despite Steve’s glare leveled at him, because he’s got a deathwish. “Also from your face, I guess you _really_ want to.”

Steve gets up, pointedly not sparing Tony a glance. “I’m not having this conversation with you.”

“I’m right, though, aren’t I? I’m so right.” Tony is glowing with self-assured triumph.

He puts multiple dead-of-night inventions that will have no good come out of them under an array of lab tests to prevent them from blowing up in his face (they do, anyway), but he’s never bothered to analyse whether his head would make a good punching bag. Maybe it’s high time someone did it for him.

Steve climbs back onto the ladder, snatching up the string hanging from a branch and pooling on the hardwood floor in a heap of plastic.

“It doesn’t matter how much I want to, Tony,” he says, untying a knot. Bucky is a living, breathing embodiment of the phrase ‘sex on legs’; of course Steve wants to. He has basic human urges, for crying out loud. “We’re friends, that’s it.”

“What?!” Nat’s scandalized voice resounds behind his back. “So he doesn’t know? God, Rogers, you’re such a wimp!” Something - a cookie crumb - swats the bare strip of skin above the collar of Steve’s sweater, and when he turns around, rubbing at his neck, Natasha’s hand is still up in the air.

He wrinkles his nose at her.

Nat lowers her arm. She closes the empty box to put it away on the coffee table, and leans back, crossing one yoga pant-clad leg over the other. “Don’t you worry, it’s Christmas. You’ll get caught under some mistletoe sooner or later.” Her voice is still conceited, not quite sarcastic, yet carrying enough of a joking tone for it to be heard in the way she deepens her syllables. The arc of her sharply cut lips softens, like someone has flipped a switch in her brain.

Contrary to what some naysayers might yowl, she’s not a machine, and she wants the best for Steve. That’s why he loves her to pieces - for her enormous heart she hides beneath layers of coarseness and crass humour.

Steve smiles. “You’d better be right,” he says, and returns to wrapping the tree in lights.

Perhaps he will ask Hollie to attach a tuft of mistletoe in The Yellow Bowtie’s doorway.

 

* * *

 

Hollie hangs mistletoe of her own initiative, tying it with red ribbon to a hook above the door, so small Steve has never noticed it. In fact, he only takes heed of it once Bucky runs into an exceptionally attractive young woman on the café’s threshold while he and Steve are leaving for a present-buying quest into the city with ten days left until Christmas Eve, leading a conversation about the best way to have toast in broken French.

The girl catches at Bucky’s bicep to stop herself from toppling over, startled, and Bucky steels her with a hand on her waist, courteous but no less _there_. Jealousy simmers low in Steve’s abdomen at the splay of Bucky’s fingers on her navy blue jacket - it’s ridiculous, it’s not like they’re kissing in front of him.

Until the girl looks up, spots the mistletoe and looks down at her toes with a pretty chuckle, covering her mouth with a tan hand. Bucky follows in her footsteps and steals a confused peak at the ceiling, smiling somehow uneasily when he, too, catches sight of the lump of green twigs.

“May I?” the girl asks, gazing back up at him, red-lipsticked mouth stretched in a smile.

Bucky nods.

Steve can feel his jaw give a sickening click as he grits his teeth, nostrils flaring. Bucky is not his property, he’s nothing but his friend as far as he himself knows, but nevertheless, Steve wants to tear the girl’s hands off of him and claim him as his, right before her watchful slanting eyes.

“A tradition is a tradition,” Bucky says.

He presses his lips to the girl’s, sweet and demure, and something in Steve implodes with a throbbing roar. He doesn’t miss the way the girl touches Bucky’s neck, featherlight, neither does he overlook how she angles her head to deepen the kiss.

He has never held anyone in so much contempt in his entire life.

By the time Bucky backs away, Steve is fuming. Only a couple of seconds the girl’s lips were plastered to Bucky’s, but to Steve it feels like an insufferable multitude of light years, prolonged by the unrepentant rage in Steve’s gut, sending stomach-churning shivers crawling down his back.

“Merry Christmas,” Bucky says, alluring as ever, with a little smile. The girl straightens her sleek ponytail - pointlessly so, because Bucky’s fingers didn’t come anywhere near it; if they did, Steve would be in cardiac arrest on his way to the hospital - and with an astounding sense of poise, she smiles.

“Likewise,” she says and with no other exchange of pleasantries, she and Bucky maneuver around each other in the doorway to go in their respectful directions.

“Huh,” Bucky says to Steve once they’re walking down the chock-full street.

“Yeah,” Steve hums in reply, hands buried deep in the pockets of his jeans, inept to stave off the thrum of envy still coursing through his bloodstream.

Steve is well aware that it’s futile as hell, but Bucky is _his_ , damn it. He’s out of bounds, and when anyone who looks like they may actually have an existing chance at picking him up comes to touching him, even as much as skimming their fingertips over his elbow, Steve’s shoulders tense and he turns into a possessive mess of a person who can’t afford to get a grip on himself.

He might be in deeper than he lets on.

A pinkish red stain is spilling past the outline of Bucky’s lips, left behind by the girl as a treacherous souvenir. Steve debates not mentioning it so Bucky will get odd once-overs from passersby, but he realises what a farcical route his thoughts are heading down and decides against it.

It’s kind of pathetic, really, how the petty eight-year-old boy in him still gets a say in some given matters, when he should be long devoid of the right to make any decisions that matter for longer than a quarter of an hour.

“You got a little something,” Steve says, pointing vaguely towards his lips. Bucky lifts his fingers to his face with a small ‘oh’ and wipes at his mouth using the back of his hand. He smears the lipstick out onto his cheek instead of scrubbing it away, and Steve laughs; he can’t remain cross for long, not when Bucky is unaware of looking like his chin is blushing.

“Here, let me.” Steve pulls a freshly laundered handkerchief from his pocket, dampens the cotton with his tongue, and rubs at Bucky’s cheek, careful to be delicate.

His fellow Avengers adore to torment Steve about him being a torpid grandpa from the thirties at heart - the checkered handkerchief is part of a set of four Nat has given him as a joke for his last birthday (it might have been a gag gift, but they are too good of a quality for her to have downright treated them like one).

In one way or another, Steve’s hand meanders over to hold Bucky’s face steady as he works to rub away the smudge of color, and he only notes what he’s done when Bucky shifts and the faint stubble dusting his jaw prickles Steve’s palm.

“Sorry,” Steve mutters, jerking his hand back. Bucky smiles, placid and intoxicating.

“You're fine,” he says, uncannily quiet. The stinging gusts of wind are playing with his hair, laying it across his forehead so it’s falling into his eyes. Steve longs to sweep the dark cowlicks out of Bucky’s face with gentle fingers, but just as he gathers up the courage to reach out, Bucky does it himself, brushing the hair up and to the side.

He leaves it ruffled, bearing dents where he ran his hand through it.

“Is it gone?” he asks, back to his usual volume, and Steve needs a second to remind himself what Bucky is talking about.

“Hm? Oh, er, yeah.” Steve pushes the bunched-up handkerchief carrying pale streaks of crimson into his jeans’ pocket. The only color on Bucky’s face, now, is the lovely, cold-ensued rosiness of his cheeks.

“Thanks,” Bucky says.

“No big deal,” Steve says, though his bare skin inches from Bucky’s lips might be the biggest deal there is. It made Steve’s insides tie themselves into knots, touching Bucky, and if Steve’s body is willing to blow the whistle on him like this in the face of brushing a thumb down the man's cheek, his life may be sadder than he initially made it out to be. “Let’s get going.” He stalks forward and Bucky rushes after him, falling into step with him almost immediately.

Manhattan is swimming in festive brightness; the neon glare of billboards is now joined by hundreds of glowing lights the naked trees lining the streets are cloaked with instead of leaves. In the shop windows, there’s an abundance of Christmas decorations, more or less elaborate - stacks of intricately wrapped boxes under snow-sprinkled pines, reindeers with glitter noses, more Santa hats than Steve cares to count.

“I gotta say, the people I’m used to kissing don’t usually leave lipstick on me, so,” Bucky says suddenly as they traverse a jam-packed pedestrian crossing. “That was sorta a new thing.”

Steve frowns. “What do you mean?” He’s always taken Bucky’s imaginary girlfriend as one owning an extensive collection of lip colors stored in their own drawer of her dresser. “Doesn’t your gal like makeup?” Steve blurts out before Bucky can construct a sensible reply, and he _keeps going_ , because he’s an imbecile if the world has ever seen one. “Which is okay, you know, no one is obliged to wear it or anyth-”

Bucky stops him with a hand on his shoulder and, praise the Lord, he laughs. “Steve. I don’t have a girlfriend.” His smile grows milder, more soft. “Not really my side of the road, if you know what I mean.”

Steve does indeed know what he means, and his hapless heart lurches when his ears catch up to Bucky’s words. Untamed glee is making white noise ring in Steve’s head as he spits out a mangled, “Are you serious?”, trying not to sound as ecstatic as he feels.

Bucky could, in theory, be attracted to him, as an abstract concept if nothing else.

Steve doesn’t know whose hands he should shower with kisses yet, but once he finds out, he’s up to spending the whole upcoming week gratifying all their meaningless whims.

“You got a problem with that?” Bucky bristles, his Brooklyn accent sharpening like it does whenever he’s miffed, and Steve starts. He holds his hands out in front of himself, vigorously shaking his head, quick to impede Bucky’s affronted glare that there’s no stopping once it reaches a certain level of blazing anger.

Steve can see how Bucky could think he’s irked. After all, he _did_ grow up in the nineteen twenties where being gay wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. Quite the opposite - finding yourself caught in the act warranted you a one-way ticket to jail, and guaranteed loathing from everyone in the periphery as a bewitching bonus.

“Not at all!” Steve assures, frantic. “Tell you what, I’d be a hypocrite if I did.”

Steve hasn’t come out to anyone beside his teammates and, as of two days ago, Maria Hill (which, Steve insists, was an accident), and when Bucky’s daring scowl transfigures into the brilliant smile Steve will never for the life of him tire of seeing, something right above Steve’s solar plexus flutters, not at all unwelcome.

“Yeah?” Bucky breathes. Steve beams right back at him.

The whole coming out debacle isn’t too awful after all.

 

* * *

 

Steve is melting into Bucky’s comfortable loveseat in a way that suggests that if he lets himself close his eyes, he will fall asleep, which isn’t considered the most polite move when one is invited to a friend’s home for the first time, and hopes for it not to be the last. Especially when the aforementioned friend welcomes them into said home on Christmas Eve.

Bucky insisted Steve come over the moment he heard Steve hasn’t watched his favorite Christmas movie. Steve not being familiar with a whooping eighty or so percent of films made after 1940 shouldn’t come out as that much of a surprise by now, really, but upon Steve confessing he hasn’t been acquainted with _Love Actually_ , Bucky’s face bore the impression of a person who’s been falsely accused of triple homicide.

He took a firm hold of Steve’s forearm and led him all the way to his apartment in Bed-Stuy, where he turned his impressive hoard of DVD’s over to find his recording of the movie. (Tony has once said that no one in their right mind uses DVD’s anymore, so Steve was a little puzzled at first.)

Unexpectedly, the TV’s sound cuts off and Steve’s head snaps up. Bucky is on tenterhooks, looking at him with the remote in his hand. At some point during Steve’s time on the cusp of sleep, he has wrapped himself up in a rainbow scarf the size of a small boa constrictor that his nana has knitted for him when he first came out to her as an awkward teenager. There were hugs and ugly crying involved when he unwrapped it from its packaging of brown paper and twine, Bucky says.

Fantasising about pulling Bucky in for a kiss by that scarf is a frequent occurrence for Steve.

“How did you like it?” Bucky asks, smiling uncertainly, and _God_ , he’s adorable like that, kept on the edge of his seat by Steve’s upcoming review of his Holy Grail of a movie.

Steve smiles back. “It was amazing,” he says, because he started to doze off once the credits rolled and the film itself was great. “Really heartwarming.”

“Right?” Bucky laughs. With Steve’s stare on him, he falls silent. He holds Steve’s eye a bit too long than is proper, but then bows his head and clears his throat, standing up from his armchair.

If Steve were more naive, he would say there is a blush blooming on Bucky’s face.

“I gotta finish packing,” Bucky says, pointing to an open suitcase strewn with clothes that Steve now notices. Bucky is probably leaving for Christmas. “D’you want more tea?” He nods his head to Steve’s empty mug.

Steve wouldn’t mind a second helping of whatever he drank - it was delicious, some mix of orange and ginger sweetened with honey - but Bucky obviously has something he ought to get to and Steve doesn’t want to delay him, so he shakes his head no.

“I should probably go.” Steve makes to get up from the loveseat, but Bucky stops him with a hand in the air.

“No!” he exclaims. Slowly, Steve sits back down. Now he can definitely admit that Bucky’s face reddens.

Bucky clears his throat again. “I mean. You can stay. If you want to,” he says, quieter. Steve nods.

“I do.”

“That’s great,” Bucky says. Steve hums.

Bucky stands rooted to the spot, his lips parted ever-so-slightly, and he doesn’t drop Steve’s gaze until a loud honk of a car rings out on the street below and he jerks.

As soon as Bucky walks to the other room to presumably sift through his closet, Steve mourns the loss of eye contact. Sharing looks with Bucky makes him feel like someone is teasing at the nape of his neck with a feather, making him squirm like when you scooch away from someone prodding at your most ticklish spot.

Sometimes, Steve doesn’t believe he will make it much longer with restraining himself from touching Bucky in a way strictly different from what he has the nerve to do. He sneaks in pats on the shoulder, short-lived strokes against the palm when he wants to bring Bucky’s attention to something, but braving himself into initiating something that would betray his feelings is yet to be crossed off of Steve’s to-do list.

Hooking his chin over his arms that he folds over the backrest of the loveseat, Steve scrutinizes the apartment.

Like its owner, Bucky’s quarters are exceedingly easy on the eye. With high ceilings and white walls, the small space feels bigger than it is in reality, and the design helps to elevate the illusion further - the place’s decor is minimalist, but by no means scant.

The entirety of the broad windowsill is crowded with plants in mismatched clay pots, and the coffee table of cherry-colored wood is littered with sheets of paper covered in hurried notes and rough pencil sketches of mechanical schemes, similar to those Tony constantly leaves in his wake all around the Tower (‘a show of intellectual dominance,’ Pepper calls it, equal parts amused and exasperated).

There are books crammed into every sliver of space and balanced in precarious pillars in spots lacking it. The tomes are an even assortment of old and new, of covers yellow with age, and of crisp, white pages, but each and every book's spine is cracked, conveying the reverent love Bucky must, no doubt, handle them with.

“Please remind me to check if I’m going to the correct terminal when I’m at the airport,” Bucky says, coming out of the bedroom. He’s carrying a stack of folded t-shirts that’s posing an immediate hazard of plummeting to the floor at any given time, but before Steve can get up to help, Bucky puts the shirts on the coffee table, shoving the jumble of scattered papers aside with his forearm to make room. “Last time, I went to the whole other side and missed my flight.”

When Steve snorts, Bucky runs a hand through his already messy hair and smiles his mesmerising smile that makes Steve’s vision blur at the corners.

If they go on like that, Steve has a valid risk of going blind by January.

“JFK is a big airport, don’t laugh at me,” Bucky says, playfully hurling one of the sweaters already laid out on the table at Steve’s head. Steve catches it in one hand without even turning his head to regard it; when Bucky goes to retrieve the pullover, under his breath he mumbles something that sounds suspiciously like “Show-off.”

“You’re just jealous,” Steve teases, tipping his chin up in false challenge. Laying his clothes down into his suitcase, Bucky laughs.

“Believe me, pal, the only thing I’m jealous of is that while I’m boarding a plane in,” he steals a look at the old-fashioned clock on the kitchen wall that’s saying it’s mere minutes past three, “two and a half hours, you get to stay in New York, all nice and cozy.”

Steve takes a breath. “Don’t go, then,” he says. _Stay with me instead,_ he doesn’t.

The three words are such a neutral statement, so bland and easy, but when Steve takes into account the intentions they’re tinted with, he feels like he’s overstepping a boundary.

Bucky laughs, though, less cheerful this time.

“God knows I wish I could, but I gotta go,” he says, heading back into his bedroom.

Steve turns around on the couch to observe Bucky’s path, pulling his legs up and resting his elbows on his knees. From where he’s sitting, he can see the foot of Bucky’s bed, the red-and-white striped covers unmade.

“Why?” Steve asks as Bucky disappears behind the door jamb. “What’s making you?”

Bucky sighs audibly. He comes back out with two pairs of rolled-up jeans that he, for a reason that Steve’s sure exists, puts on the granite kitchen counter, and he stops to assess the contents of his luggage, shortly launching back into his pacing.

“It’s the student exchange,” Bucky says, diving back into his room for more clothes. “The one in Paris that you’ve been agonizing yourself to prepare me for,” he adds, voice muffled, and though his face is hidden away, in Bucky’s words Steve can hear the sharp grin carved into that plush mouth of his.

For a month and some of learning, Bucky has got a surprisingly good grasp on French. He won’t recite renaissance poetry, but he can say what he’s been up the previous day, or find his way to the nearest corner store. He also juggles a colorful variety of swear words Steve might or might have not fed him about two thirds of.

“I wasn’t agonizing myself,” Steve says, cocking his head to the side in what Bucky refers to as the Puppy Tilt.

Bucky resurfaces with a pair of black sneakers and a snort. “You say that, but I saw your face when you had to explain the subjective for the third time.”

“Okay, to be fair, I was really tired that day,” Steve says, inducing his friend’s golden laughter.

Bucky slides the shoes into a plastic bag, soles facing together, and puts the package into his suitcase, on top of a dark red hoodie he’s worn the time they roamed through Chinatown and both got food poisoning from pork baozi.

“So. The student exchange, what about it?” Steve steers the conversation back onto the course it was meant to set. “Why do you have to go so bad?”

Bucky abandons his baggage and goes to rest his hip against his kitchen cupboard, rubbing the bridge of his nose with pinched fingers. “Well, I… it’s sort of a long story, but in the first semester I volunteered to go as an alternative to staying here, to change my environment or whatever shit was on my mind back then.”

He pours himself a glass of water that he chugs in one go, swiping a weary hand down his face as he places the glass in the sink. There’s a smattering of dark stubble across his jaw, meaning he hasn’t seen a razor the past morning or two.

“But now, after the last couple months, it doesn’t seem so great an idea anymore,” he says and shrugs. “I figure, sure, I could still file something with the registrar if I wanted to stay so bad I could eat myself alive, but how awful can it really be?” He pushes himself away from the cupboard, grabs the previously laid there jeans and traipses back over to his half-full suitcase. “I’ll go to Paris, eat some snails, buy the Barnes gals a lifelong supply of lavender perfume and I’ll be done.”

“Last time I saw it, Paris was a real looker,” Steve says, catching himself on slipping an outdated phrase into the sentence when Bucky snickers. “A whimsical one, but pretty as a picture.”

“That was seventy years ago,” Bucky says with a smile.

“You can’t tell me they went and changed it much,” Steve replies, adjusting his position on the couch. His calf is starting to cramp up. “The designer skirts are shorter, but they didn’t move the Eiffel Tower, did they now?”

“Not that I know of.”

“There you go.”

For a while, there’s no noise save for the rustling of bags that Bucky puts his clothes into, according to some system Steve isn’t hoping to get the gist of. As Bucky reaches for an empty Marks & Spencer one from a pile of similar bags bundled by his feet to deposit another fuzzy-looking sweater into, Steve gets up to stretch his legs. Extending his arms over his head, he speaks to Bucky’s back.

“For how long are you going?”

Without turning away from the packing, Bucky says, “Ten months,” and at a flick of the wrist, Steve’s perception of substantiality goes to fuck itself.

It feels as though someone has yanked the floor from under him and replaced it with a narrow ice hole, simultaneously forcing burning ashes down his throat. He can taste the coal on his palate.

Steve’s expected for Bucky to be gone for three _weeks_ , four at most, that he’d muscle through like a capable human being because contrary to what his shrink gently suggests every other session, he does _not_ have abandonment issues.

“What?” Steve coughs up. Ten months without Bucky, without his lame jokes and the blue of his eyes that Steve doesn’t believe exists in nature? On no account is he fit to bear a Bucky-less existence for almost a year, no offence to Dr Loddington and the homework she gives him to keep him on track between their weekly meetings. However cheesy it can be made out to sound, Bucky is the best medicine on the market and if Steve loses access to his supply, what on Earth will he do with himself?

“Steve...? Are you okay?” Bucky is walking tentatively towards him, his face creased with fearful worry, and driven by instinct, Steve takes a step back, inwardly cursing his soldier’s habits when Bucky’s eyes swim with hurt at the movement.

“Yeah, I…” Steve struggles to say. His breathing is getting labored, trapped in his too-big chest, but he keeps his chin up and forces out a smile that feels like a grimace potent to crack the skin of his cheeks. He swallows the bile rising in his throat; the need to head for the hills is writhing behind his lungs.

He paws at his coat that Bucky’s told him to throw over a wayward kitchen chair, and when his fingers successfully latch onto the rough fabric, he looks at Bucky again, his visual field grey at the edges from the panic.

Bucky appears like an intruder in his own home, standing barefoot in the middle of his living room with a sweater in hand and distress painted over his face; a man fresh out of one of Caravaggio’s paintings.

“Steve, you’re making me really nervous,” Bucky says, and there’s a tremor to his words that Steve straight away despises.

“I’m fine,” he splutters. His heartbeat is echoing on his tongue. “I gotta- I gotta go,” he says, mashing his arms into the sleeves of his coat, wanting to cry out when he gets tangled in its tails. Bucky darts forward with his hands raised in front of himself in a placating ‘please’, but he doesn’t come close enough to touch Steve.

“You can’t leave like this,” he pleads, but Steve buttons up his coat, probably misplacing the slots, and all but bolts out of the door, skipping every other step on his way down the stairs, Bucky’s shouts clinking painfully in his ears like a wind chime in a rainstorm.

The way Bucky’s announcement takes its toll on Steve, it’s ridiculous, he realises, yet he can’t muddle through getting his breathing under control. With his mind zeroing in on the premise of not seeing Bucky for ten months, maybe never again, Steve jabs his hand into his pocket, then into the other when he doesn’t find the thing he’s searching for, until he scoops out a coiled lump that is his headphones, nearly gouging out a hole in his coat’s lining. He pushes the earbuds into his ears so forcefully it hurts, and with shaky fingers, he opens the playlist Sam has helped him put together for moments like this, when his throat is closing up and the pavement feels like a thin layer of sand that will dissipate to reveal an endless abyss bound to swallow you down if you make one wrong move.

Steve turns up the volume as high as he can bear it and heads for the subway, coercing himself into doing breathing exercises courtesy of Bruce.

Once on the train, Steve tries to focus on nothing else but the tranquil melody of Chopin’s _Waltz in B Minor_ turned up loud enough to drown out the noise of Christmas Eve in underground New York, but his desolate head is adamant on circling back time and time again to the wretched two words that are making his stomach suck in on itself.

_Ten months._

He stormed out so fiercely, he didn’t have the chance to say his final goodbye.

That was the last time he would be running across Bucky and he didn’t even think long enough to take all of him in, to see Bucky off like he deserves.

Some fraction of Steve is momentarily frightened that having not devoted a second to memorizing them, he will forget the details of Bucky’s face, but deep down, Steve knows for a fact that Bucky, the arc of his upper lip and the faded freckles on the bridge of his nose, it’s all burned under Steve’s eyelids for good and he wouldn’t do to scrub it away if he tried his damn best.

His head thumps back against the rattling window and he closes his eyes, pressing the little button on his headphones’ cable to make the waltz play louder still.

He must have fallen into some form of slumber or other, because the next thing he registers is someone’s hand shaking his shoulder lightly. He opens his eyes to a concerned face pleated with a net of criss-crossing wrinkles leaning over him, and he sits up a little straighter. The waltz has long ended, replaced by another composition of Chopin’s that Steve doesn’t recognize.

“Is anything the matter, son?” the elderly gentleman asks, a British lilt in his vowels, and Steve can’t help but think, _I’m probably a good decade older than you_.

“No, sir,” he says. “Everything’s alright. But thank you.”

His heart rate has come down to its normal rhythm and he can breathe with his lungs’ full capacity again, so the words are only partially a lie.

The man nods, relieved, and exits the train when it next comes to a standstill.

For the short rest of the near-one-hour ride, Steve surveys a person sat opposite him fight tooth and nail to perfect their makeup in the screen of their phone. Steve can’t pinpoint their gender - the kid looks like one of Tolkien’s elves, with abnormally large dark eyes and the boyish cut of their emerald green hair.

The person raises their head in the middle of spreading glitter across their high cheekbones, catching Steve staring. He cracks a minuscule smile so the urban elf doesn’t assume his intentions lie elsewhere than on the positive side of neutral, and the elf responds in kind, a gleam of metal flashing in their frenulum when they grin brightly.

They return to their makeup, and on the next stop, Steve gets off the train.

He walks the last of the distance separating him from the Tower, the twirling mass of snowflakes falling from the sky melting on his face when they connect with the warm surface of his skin.

The streets are bustling, loud with frenzied shoppers seeking out last-minute presents and with people hurrying in every direction possible and one more for good measure. The prevailing happiness doesn’t overpower the fact that Steve’s shoes feel like they’re stuffed full of quarters, though - his shoulders are hunched, burdened with a weight beknownst to no one but Steve, and inside, he is the five-foot-four boy entirely out of his depth again.

On his way, he’s roped into assisting an older lady in packing a cornucopia of bags into the boot of a waiting cab, and when he at last walks into the Avengers’ common room to make himself a well-deserved cup of shincha tea that Pepper imports all the way from Japan, it’s with a pocketful of caramel candies in crackling cellophane wrappers that every grandmother has padding the bottom of her purse.

Before he can limp across to the kitchen, however, or take off his coat at that, he stumbles upon the whole of his team (with the exception of Sam, who left for DC for Christmas this morning) sat on the leather couches, nursing mugs of the very tea he’s positively dying to get his hands on. They must be crafting an elaborate conspiracy, because unless it’s a matter of national security or one of Thor’s dubious culinary inventions, the Avengers never see all of each other at once before their daily group training at quarter to three.

Currently, it’s a little past two, and surely enough, when Steve looks at the set of them, ridiculous in their lounging attire, without a word, Natasha smiles her disturbingly sweet little smile that never bids well and says, “Steve, it’s time for a team talk.”

Steve considers taking to his heels, but if Nat is set on serving someone one of her infamous talks, she will find a way to do it this time or another, all right, so he braces himself for ripping off the bandaid and getting it over with.

“What’s the matter?” he sighs, crossing his arms over his chest. Natasha motions to an empty spot on the couch opposite hers, that she’s probably saved for him so he would feel more intimidated than it’s called for.

“Come sit,” she says, and Steve obeys, settling down next to Clint who’s draining a multivitamin Capri-Sun, wearing a sweatshirt with SEND MEMES printed on it in fat block letters.

“Hey, man,” Clint mumbles around the thin orange straw wedged between his teeth, and holding his juice packet in place with one hand, he reaches out with the other to hand Steve a mug covered with a chipped black saucer that he himself had a hand at nicking.

Steve accepts the mug, hesitant - Clint’s pranks have made quite a name for themselves in the Tower - but when he carefully lifts the saucer, his face is instantaneously enveloped by a plume of fragrant steam.

“Thank you,” he breathes, grateful, and takes a sip. Whoever has made the tea has remembered how he takes it.

“What’s going on?” he adds when no one in the room speaks, staring at him instead like starved magpies. Being subjected to the joined looks of an elite team of people designed to win all the fights they get into, from bar brawls to nuclear wars, is bone-chilling to Steve not because he will get beaten to pulp and thrown into federal jail by them, but because for some reason, he’s about to receive the talking-down of a lifetime from Black Widow and their mutual friends.

Natasha drinks up her tea with the grace of a Russian heiress and sets her customised mug down to cradle it in her lap. The birthday present from Clint is her favorite - pale pink porcelain with the words ‘You’re the only spider I’m not afraid of’ traced on the side in meticulous copperplate.

“Well, Steve,” she begins, circling the rim of the mug with an immaculately manicured finger. Steve gets the jitters from the distracted movement alone. He holds Natasha near and dear to his heart, but she can be fucking _terrifying_. “We can all agree that we’ve never seen you as happy as when you get home after meeting up with your guy,” she says, and the already debatable improvement in Steve’s horrid mood shatters like a glass smashed with a baseball bat. “We think you should go for it and shoot your shot, because, well,” she stops to smile.

That’s the Nat Steve watches reruns of 80’s sitcoms with when neither of them can sleep: flashing the crooked grin which reaches her eyes the way the dignified smiles that make reporters eat out of the palm of her hand never do. “If that’s how much you’re glowing right now, you’d outrival the sun if you cuffed him down for yourself,” she finishes, to hums of agreement from the rest of the Avengers.

Steve would appreciate the care with a level of fond aggravation if he hadn’t lost his chance at ‘cuffing’ Bucky down an hour and some ago. It sizzles red hot in his shoulders the instant he’s reminded of it, painful and invasive.

“That’s real nice of you,” Steve says, catching the involuntary bitterness in his voice, “but you’re a bit late.”

Steve feels Clint shift beside him in curiosity. Natasha’s groomed eyebrow soars upwards.

“What do you mean?” she says. “What did you do?”

Steve rolls his eyes. Of course she would assume the catastrophe was his doing, or at least go through the motions of pretending that she did. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Did you do _someone_?” Tony pipes in, waggling his eyebrows from above the brim of his mug of tea that’s probably spiked with vodka, or at least the Argentinian whisky he proclaims to be the world’s eighth wonder.

“Do you think I would look like this if I did?” Steve snaps, pointing to his scowl. Once in a blue moon, Tony can be a real peach if he wants to, but most days he’s getting on everyone’s nerves. Right now, he’s pushing his luck, probing at Steve’s self-control with his inherent screwdriver that’s tucked behind his ear even now.

“Hey, I wouldn’t know,” Tony says. “As far as I’m indulged, you could be the crying-after kind. Like, when you-”

“Tony, that’s enough,” Bruce cuts in, docile but firm. Tony deflates like an old balloon and slumps back into the sofa with a pointed grumble of, “Fine, _dad_ ”, and Bruce ignores him in favor of tipping his body towards Steve, cushioning his mug in the shape of Darth Vader’s helmet on his thigh. A cluster of his overgrown curls falls across his forehead as he scoots over to the edge of his part of the couch, and Steve feels a sudden ripple of affection for him.

Day by day, Bruce refuses to participate in Tony’s exalted Steve-victimising jamborees. It’s unheard of for Bruce to take the mickey out of anyone in general - he’s a lemon balm pill personified, mollifying and always up to helping anyone in need of a willing hand.

“What happened, Steve?” he asks, his hand going to tuck his fringe away in an absent-minded reflex.

Steve’s tea is cooling down, and he takes his sweet time drinking it, looking to impede the inevitable answer he has to provide sooner or later. He’s only buying himself a dozen or so seconds, but being the unintentional centerpiece in the room, those meagre scraps of time are all he has to scrabble onto, and he’ll damn well squeeze them of their worth.

Before he knows it, though, the bottom of his cup shows itself and he sighs, sitting the empty dish down on the coffee table. He has no excuse left to stall, now.

“He, uh,” Steve says, picking at a loose thread in the coat he still has buttoned up to his neck. Bucky’s harrowed face swims before his eyes, and, inhaling deeply, Steve wills the tight lump in his throat to dissolve, to no avail. “He left.”

“What do you mean, left?” Clint asks on behalf of the confused faces staring back at Steve as if he’s speaking Mandarin (which doesn’t really do them justice, since Natasha is perfectly fluent in seven Chinese dialects, but it’s a figure of speech and Steve’s in a mental dump). “Everyone is leaving right now, it’s Christmas Eve.”

“No,” Steve says, ashamed to admit it comes out with a tetchy undertone of a whine. “He left for good. He’s moving to Paris today.” He looks at the clock hung up on the wall. With its steel hands and round face sliced out of black marble, it’s a polar opposite of the wooden cuckoo clock in Bucky’s kitchen, and Steve’s stomach clenches, both at the difference and at the time the modern atrocity is displaying. “His plane is flying out in an hour.”

Much to Steve’s chagrin, the atmosphere in the room sombers. Clint pats him on the shoulder, murmuring an apologetic, “That sucks”. Even Tony’s fight drains out of him, which Steve can live with, but the mildly constipated look on Natasha’s makeup-free face, distinguishable to Steve as her unique take on an upset pout, is like a thorn in his side.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce says quietly, and Steve shrugs. _I guess nice things aren’t meant for me to have_ , he doesn’t say, partly because he knows the statement to be a product of the wry voice hiding in a dark corner of his mind, and partly because Nat would make a ruckus if he dared to say it out loud.

He could use a distraction from how much he wants to bundle himself up in his comforter and sleep into next week, but before he can open his mouth to suggest a Christmas movie marathon, Thor speaks up.

“Your love, he has not yet left the United States, yes?” he says. On another day, Steve would chuckle at the way he unfurls the US’ name instead of using the time- and effort-saving acronym. Today, he frowns.

“Technically, no,” Steve says. “He’s probably at the airport already, though.” The thought of Bucky scuffling through the busy terminal, convinced he was what made Steve flee as he’s laying down his last steps on American soil before he flies off to France to possibly never see Steve in the flesh again, it makes Steve dizzy with guilt.

Thor’s face is shrouded with thought, the cogs detectably turning in his head, and Steve finds it obligatory to add, “Why does it matter?”

In his typical fashion, Tony gets a word in before the person whose turn it is to talk can warm up their larynx.

“Ooh, I think I know what He-Man is getting at,” he says, pouring himself a second cup of tea from a ‘state of contemporary art’ teapot he’s fought for on some auction, that Steve thinks is simply nasty. It’s not that he’s got old-fashioned taste (he can appreciate a decent piece of modern oeuvre if he sees one), it’s that he has _a_ taste.

“Enlighten us, then,” Steve says when Tony doesn’t whip out a hip flask like he’s expected him to. He could swear on his left leg that Tony owns one - once upon a time, Tony’s taken a huge, offhand swig from it during a press conference gone overboard, and Pepper was absolutely livid with him for an entire month about the amount of damage control she had to wrestle through.

Tony blows on his tea despite it surely having had plenty of time to go lukewarm in the pot. Steve knows Tony’s making one of his dramatic pauses in order to keep the attention on him, like his entire life is an ongoing fundraiser with him as an honorary sponsor. One day, Steve is going to butt in while Tony is weaving his suspense, and start asking around for the toppings everyone wants on their waffles, because if anything infuriates Tony, it’s interrupting his monologues with talk of mundane things.

“What Point Break means is the ultimate cinematic classic,” Tony says after what feels like two hours and a half. “The boarding chase. The race against departure schedules. The creme de la creme of rom-com climaxes.”

Yeah, no, the hip flask must be hidden somewhere in the room.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Clint asks, confounded, proving to Steve that it isn’t his mind playing tricks on him and the fault lies in Tony’s gibberish that everyone should have been able to decipher by now, but patently can’t. The guy is like the fucking Enigma: his code changes every night and it would take a war to break him down.

“Jesus wept, Legolas,” Tony says, shaking his head. “Have you never seen _Friends_?”

“Anthony,” Thor interrupts. There is an unusual urgency in his normally relentless, exuberant rumble of a voice. “I treasure you greatly, but this is not an opportunity for idleness. Time is of the essence.”

The way Thor talks, it’s the image of Steve that is promoted by teachers in elementary schools, and he will forever be inherently amused by it. What he is not entertained by, is how steadfast Thor looks, sitting on the couch with his mug the size of a small bucket. Steve is accustomed to Thor’s thundering laughter and his bone-crushing hugs, and the habitual joy that seems to ooze out of his very pores. As it happens, he’s merry even in battle - serene, focused, yes, but never grim.

Right now, his mouth is pursed in resolve, back ramrod straight, and if Steve didn’t already know that Thor is to be feared when you rub him the wrong way, now the quiet decision to never step on the god’s toes would be set in stone.

“Captain,” Thor chides, leaning in. Instinctively, Steve mimics his stance. Thor is like a six-foot mirror, or better yet, a magnet - your body follows his movements, irrespective of your will.

“If your dearest has not slipped away yet,” Thor says, “why do you not follow him and confess the nature of your desires?” He lifts his mug to his lips, drags a quick sip of tea. The room is silent, listening to him with out-of-character focus that’s marginally eerie, but again, who is Steve to judge. “Perhaps, if you offer him your heart, he will stay by your side to surround it with care.”

It takes Steve’s buzz-addled head more time that he would have liked to parse through Thor’s speech, but when the sense of his spiel gets across to him, Steve’s mentioned heart skips a beat.

“I won’t make it,” he says, the words practically punched out of his lungs. Out in the open like this, Thor’s idea sets him on edge, gets his blood humming in his ears like a storm, but it’s Steve’s last resort and unless he’s ready to give up all hope, he needs to depend on it or else he will lose everything he ever bargained for ever since he first longed to hold the hand of someone who wasn’t his mother. “The airport is too far from here.”

In a trice, his pulse is thumping in his fingertips, galloping in his neck in a frenetic staccato. His head is short-circuiting, counting out the ETA’s corresponding to every single route he can possibly pelt down, including those that would result in him clutching a number of tickets by the time he arrives at JFK.

The vision of Bucky slipping out of his hands is flashing in Steve’s mind like a neon sign, and his calves are stinging to run.

“Take a cab, Steve,” Nat says. She’s draped on the sofa like a disinterested tiger, but because she let Steve learn to read her, in the set of her hands he can see wired enthusiasm, the kind that buzzes through you when you’re waiting for the results of an exam you have a feeling you’ve aced but are nervous anyway. “I’d say ride your bike, but I don’t trust your driving capability much right now.”

A chain of sarcastic responses comes to Steve’s mind, but he stems them off.

“You think I’ll manage on time?” he says, lower back throbbing hotly with adrenaline.

“You won’t if you keep on talking,” Clint says. “Go, for fuck’s sake!” he exclaims, and before Clint can throw the balled-up foil from his straw’s packaging at him, Steve springs up and makes a run for it, bypassing the elevator and sprinting headlong down the stairs for the second time today, leaving his friends’ encouraging whistling behind.

It takes him a couple of minutes to tackle the stairwell. He flies down ninety storeys as though he’s been given a pair of wings, and when he bursts out the automated doors onto the street, he tears open the door of the first nearby taxi that winds its way into view.

“JFK Airport, Terminal 1, please,” he rattles off, clambering inside, digging the numbers out of the hazy memory of Bucky’s itinerary that Steve’s picked up and laid on the coffee table after he’s accidentally kicked it to the floor.

The driver, a middle-aged man with a receding hairline, looks Steve over skeptically, chewing on a lollipop that’s seen better days, a look of ‘I don’t want to be here and neither do you’ dulling his brown eyes framed by beginnings of crow’s feet.

“I’ll tip you fifteen dollars if you drive your fastest,” Steve barks in a bout of impatience-induced generosity, his voice tainted by old-time Brooklyn.

The cabbie’s eyes widen and he scrambles to turn the key in the ignition, shifting the gear stick as the car’s engine rumbles to life, and he moves into the fast lane, zipping past the yellow light just before it changes to red.

The drive takes a torturous total of fifty two minutes that Steve watches tick by on the car’s dashboard clock. Every bit of traffic is jeering at him, shrieking _It’s too late_ into his ear, and when the driver pulls up in front of the terminal’s towering building, Steve is practically vibrating out of his skin.

“Ya owe me forty five dollars,” the driver says, apathetic. His own distinct accent reveals him to be an Alabama native. “Plus what ya promised me,” he adds, propping his elbow on his headrest and looking at Steve over the shoulder.

Steve fumbles for his wallet in the pockets of his coat. He digs out a crumpled fifty and a ten with a missing corner and stuffs them into the man’s outstretched hand, groping around for the door handle as soon as the cabbie’s fingers close around the notes.

“Merry Christmas!” Steve shouts as he jumps out of the car, and before the door slams closed, the man says, “Same to ya!”

Without looking back, Steve races towards the entrance to the terminal, zig-zagging his way through the horde of suitcase-laden travelers like it’s an advanced obstacle course.

It’s five twenty six pm, which gives Steve four minutes to seek Bucky out in the ocean of heads milling about before Bucky’s plane takes off.

Against his better judgement, Steve’s praying that Bucky hasn’t gone through security yet. Even if he has, though, Steve would find a way to get around it - a way that directly involves jumping the turnstiles and using the Captain America card on the guards sent to cuff him.

As he stands looking around feverishly like a madman, Steve realises he hasn’t got the barest hint of an idea what approach to take. The departure hall is full to bursting, a human anthill, and he has no means of contacting Bucky - the battery of Steve’s Starkphone, fancy as it is, gave up on him in the morning and at the time, he didn’t think to plug it in to charge.

Steve considers bothering one of the many Customer Service agents, but he has no reliable information about the state in which Bucky ended up leaving his house that he could give as his distinguishing feature. ‘Dark hair, about this tall’ could easily apply to every other person that’s passed through the airport’s personnel’s radar within the last quarter of an hour.

“This is a final boarding call for Air France, flight AF-538, to Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris, France. All remaining passengers please proceed immediately to boarding gate 6,” a cool female voice booms from the speakers, and when the announcement is topped off with a melodic chime, a fire roars to life in the pit of Steve’s belly, slithering up his torso into his lungs. His throat tastes of dry smoke, like wood burned at the stake.

He’s late, exactly like his most crippling fear whispered he would be.

He’s lost his chance.

But when he’s about to turn on his heel and get back out into the frosty afternoon, resigned to getting back to the Tower, an idea dawns on him, as if someone’s opened a window and let a powerful blast of fresh air into the room.

The winding line for the security checkpoint. The one place Bucky can be if he hasn’t boarded the plane yet.

Like his life depends on it, Steve breaks into a run, clutching with all his might at his last ray of hope. The bodiless voice repeats its line, somehow more stern this time despite being a pre-made recording, and Steve gathers pace, barely registering the people leaping out of his way.

As he nears the long queue, faces come into focus: a big woman scolding her son in rapid-fire Portuguese, a fair-skinned, redheaded man tossing a stress ball up into the air and catching it again in an unwavering rhythm, a petite black girl engrossed in a book thicker than her wrist.

Steve's heartbeat is thundering a mile a minute while his eyes hop from head to head, searching for Bucky's face in the crowd.

Suddenly, there it is - a flash of vibrantly colored wool and a mop of dark hair, all the way at the front of the line, and his breathing halts.

Bucky's circa forty yards away, no more, no less, but spread out tightly over the distance between him and Steve are dozens of people, taking up every inch of pavement that Steve could use to squeeze through to him.

Across the stretch of space, Bucky is shrugging off his black coat to walk through the metal detectors, beyond the point of no return, and Steve, at an impasse, knees trembling with nerves, cops hold of a plan of action that isn't a hundred percent impossible to execute.

As loudly as his vocal cords allow, he yells out Bucky's name.

At the drop of a hat, every person’s head whips around in his direction, but Steve couldn’t care less about the show he’s making of himself, because along with the others, Bucky looks back, too. When he spots Steve in the throng of travelers, alarmed, his eyes widen to the point of assuming the diameter of Pepper’s sage-scented candles, and like the Pavlov’s dog, Steve smiles.

Bucky steals a peek at the TSA agent standing behind him, hands on her hips and her mouth twisted like she’s been force-fed a lemon. Bucky’s face is turned away from Steve now, but from how the agent relaxes, donning something that on a good day could pass for a smile, Steve assumes that Bucky’s mercilessly presented her with one of his disarming simpers that could get him absolutely anywhere.

Bucky moves, excusing his way through the gathered people. Their looks vary from interested, through mildly annoyed, all toward borderline murderous, but no one dares to yap at him (Steve is expecting the worst when Bucky passes a balding man in a tweed jacket who looks fit to combust, but the guy only shakes his head and mutters something quietly enough that Bucky doesn’t catch it).

Bucky comes to a stop a solid couple of feet out of Steve’s reach, but close enough that Steve doesn’t need to strain his ears to hear the thrown-off-guard sputtering of his name that falls from Bucky’s tongue.

“What are you doing here?” Bucky asks, forehead shadowed with confusion. There is a new pin secured to the strap of his backpack, red words on a plain white, round background, that wasn’t there in the morning.

Steve takes a breath.

“I…” he begins, but the words stick to the inside of his mouth like molasses. In the face of Bucky’s dark, snow-dampened lock of hair that hasn’t completely dried falling into his eye, and his strong chin drowning in the unnecessarily gigantic scarf, the lengthy speech Steve has ruminated to every last detail in the cab fizzles out, dissolving into a blank space where there has been an expertly thought-out scheme of action.

It’s the effect Bucky has on him, Steve guesses - he comes in like a summer storm, long awaited and riveting, razing Steve’s carefully elevated walls and tugging Steve by the hand to walk a line hung up high in the air, making Steve guffaw instead of backing down like he has for months, years, reluctant to let himself go.

Bucky brings out the fire in him. Not the righteous flame of a leader, but the embers of a person who laughs until their sides cramp up, and who wiggles to the beat of their favorite song in the middle of a clothing store because the tune came up on the shop’s radio.

That fire has always been in Steve, stored away in his scraped knees at seven and in vehement eyes at twenty, but like a candle calls for a match to burn, he’s needed someone to light him up. Now that person is standing right here, with his coat thrown over his forearm and a small tear in his jeans that might be a fashion statement but could as well be a result of a stupid accident, and Steve smiles again, to himself more than to anyone else.

He doesn’t need his refined speech - he has something else.

“I’m in love with you.”

Gasps break out around Steve, a more or less contained tidal wave, but all he sees is the way Bucky’s eyes widen even further and crinkle up as a spectacular grin, the most beautiful one yet, encrusts Bucky’s face like a cut jewel set in a crown of gold.

At one fell swoop, Bucky bridges the gap between them in a few long strides. The people move out of his way as though he’s the modern-day Moses, and before Steve can say knife, Bucky slings his arms around his neck and crushes their mouths together.

It takes Steve a beat to get his bearings, but when he does, he kisses back in earnest, smoothing his hands over Bucky’s hips.

Bucky’s lips are softer than Steve’s ever anticipated, warm and silky, and they taste faintly of the over-sweetened iced tea that Bruce always shames Steve for drinking straight out of the bottle.

Sighing into Bucky’s mouth, Steve slides his hands to his waist and pulls him closer, feeling the warmth of Bucky’s body permeate through the layers of both their clothing. To have the person Steve’s pined after like a fool pressed up against him, for Bucky’s cologne to fill the air Steve breathes, it’s stellar, and he parts his lips tentatively to taste more of Bucky, revelling in the moment he’s being given.

When Bucky breaks the kiss (far earlier than it is to Steve’s liking), Steve becomes conscious of the scattered applause around them. Bucky laughs quietly in his arms after his ears come back on air, too, and when Steve catches his eye, Bucky’s smile becomes tender, coaxing Steve into tangling his fingers into that stubborn strand of dark hair and brushing it away. Bucky leans into the touch like a sleepy cat, and Steve caresses his cheekbone with his thumb, feeling the smooth skin under the pad of his finger.

Bucky’s eyelashes look almost fake, dense and long, curling upwards like a dame’s.

“C’est réciproque,” Bucky says, only for Steve to hear, and Steve’s heart swells, filled with a mellow feeling similar to the sensation you experience when you submerge yourself in a hot bubble bath after an exhausting day. Bucky’s accent is a little wonky, his American mannerisms still shining through the French pronunciation, but it isn’t off enough for Steve to not understand what he said.

_The feeling’s mutual._

And yeah, Steve could have worked that out well enough by himself, but having his biggest, most treasured hopes align with the reality of his life is something he needs outright confirmed, or else he will not quite believe how the universe decided to grace him.

As Bucky steps back, people snap back into motion, haggling over spots in the reforming queue like background characters in a Hallmark movie that’s been paused and resumed. But Bucky doesn’t walk away; he stands firmly in place with his fingers sliding down to skim Steve’s hips, and Steve feels a lukewarm glow thrum in his veins that has nothing to do with him wearing a thick winter coat in a heated airport.

“D’you have any plans for tonight?” Bucky says, playing idly at the flaps of Steve’s coat pockets.

“I don’t,” Steve says. He covers one of Bucky’s hands with his, chuckling softly at the startled look that flits across Bucky’s features at the gesture, and he intertwines their fingers so they form a loose plait.

Bucky’s hands are warm, but the very tips of his fingers are cool to the touch.

“Come home with me,” Bucky says after he’s come back to himself. A small ball of glee hops up beneath Steve’s sternum. “I got no one to spend Christmas Eve with.”

Like Steve, Bucky’s closest family have been convinced about his long-term trip overseas taking effect when it was due. After preponing the Barnes Christmas to include Bucky, they’ve gotten on a flight of their own, making their way all across the country to Oregon. In Portland, Bucky’s cousin brought a set of twins to the world at the end of November, and the clan would be flocking to her home from all corners of America to hold proper Yule celebrations and admire the newborn Denise and Mason.

Steve sways his and Bucky’s entwined hands side to side, feeling the intricate construction of fine bones shift under Bucky’s skin. It’s a marvel to Steve how comfortable Bucky is with being tactile within minutes of their first kiss, how casual about responding to Steve’s need to touch and be touched with no hesitation.

“I’d love to,” Steve says. He raises Bucky’s hand to his lips, laying a kiss on his knuckles, and Bucky blushes a beautiful, fair pink. It’s so goddamn heart-wrenching, Steve is scared his brain will melt and spill out of his ears. “But it will be late by the time we get to your place. You’d have to kick me out almost right away.”

Bucky takes Steve’s other hand in his and laces their fingers together, so the both of them are locked in a circulation of each other’s heat.

“I never said you couldn’t sleep over,” he says, rocking on the balls of his feet like an impatient schoolboy waiting at the door to the principal’s office. Something tells Steve that finding himself in that position used to be a habit for Bucky when he still marched to elementary school every morning. “Did I, Stevie?”

The affectionate abbreviation of his name never fails to make Steve’s soul quiver; today is no exception. Steve draws Bucky in by his hands and captures his lips in a fleeting kiss, biting at Bucky’s plump bottom lip lightly before he pulls back. Bucky chases his mouth, however, and Steve relents, easing Bucky’s mouth open with a gentleness he’s sometimes told he lacks.

Their hands are still weaved together. Bucky’s left index finger is drawing patterns on the back of Steve’s hand, small circles and inexplicable swirls that Steve feels on the surface of his skin as if through a fog.

By the time the kiss ends, Steve is decidedly out of breath, for the first time in what may be weeks.

“There is one problem, though,” Bucky says. His lips are red and shiny and frankly delicious-looking, and Steve doesn’t try to hide the fact that he’s staring at them like a man dying of thirst looks at a tall glass of water.

“My eyes are up here, mister,” Bucky says playfully. Steve looks up, bares his teeth in a puckish grin he doesn’t wear in the presence of anyone but Bucky these days. It’s grown to feel like that smile is Bucky’s to claim - the public gets peremptory scowls, the Avengers are presented with crooked twists of what’s trying its best to be buoyant, and Bucky takes all: the winner of a lottery that’s been made for him to win.

“Oh, darling, I know where they are,” Steve says. Bucky rolls his aforesaid eyes, purposefully exaggerating the gesture, but from how his cheeks pucker, Steve knows how much he wants to laugh.

“As much as I appreciate being called ‘darling’, Steve, we’ve really do got a problem.”

“Which is?” Steve asks, laying the teasing aside at the urgence in Bucky’s voice.

Out the corner of his eye, Steve notices someone taking a picture of them, and, clenching his teeth, he focuses on the new pin on Bucky’s chest. The red letters he wasn’t able to decrypt from afar before, spell out an enthusiastic _SCIENCE IS COOL_ , emphasised by an exclamation point and a simple drawing of an atom.

Bucky gives Steve’s hands a small squeeze. Steve doesn’t know if it’s a coincidence or if Bucky really is that much observant, perceptive of Steve’s tics, but it’s a welcome distraction from the woman pointing her phone in their direction regardless.

“I already checked my suitcase in and I need it back,” Bucky says. “And that’s not really a piece of cake, getting it returned.”

“I’ll handle it for you,” Steve says, stroking Bucky’s palms with his thumbs, and Bucky smiles. The airport’s stark, unnatural lighting is sculpting his face with sharp, short shadows, making the cleft in his chin stand out beneath his dark stubble. Steve wants to draw him with a stick of charcoal, to trace the hills and valleys of his face onto rough paper and kiss him, fingers still smudged with black.

“My knight in shining armor,” Bucky says, kissing Steve on the cheek, and pulls him by the hand towards the row of check-in desks.

 

* * *

 

 It’s nearing eight pm when they climb the stairs to Bucky’s apartment. To Bucky’s indignant protests (“I can carry my own shit, Rogers”), Steve is lugging the hard fought, sorely won suitcase.

Like Steve’s suspected, unfurling himself to his full height and adopting the tone of voice he assumes when he’s either raving mad or on the brink of it, was enough to send the flustered clerk at check-in grabbling for the phone. They got Bucky’s baggage returned in record speed, which still amounted to about two hours. But with the massive Christmas rush, Steve can’t really blame anyone for struggling to find a black suitcase with a single red identification tag tied to the handle in the sea of other black bags circulating the airport.

On their way to the third floor, a thirty-something woman scurries past them down the stairs like she’s being chased by a serial killer, yanking at the zipper of her big, pink duffle bag. A wrinkled plane ticket is sticking out of her jeans’ pocket, and her ashy blonde bun is in disarray, as if it’s been slept on.

“Hi, Miss Sheppard!” Bucky calls as she storms past, rounding the corner of the stairwell and disappearing from view. In response, a distrait “Hi, Mister Barnes!” comes echoing from below.

“She lives across the hall,” Bucky says to Steve, pulling a set of keys out of his coat pocket after the building’s doors open and close with a slam after Ms Sheppard. “Makes amazing red velvet cupcakes.”

A keychain is pinned to Bucky’s bunch of keys: a small, circular green door with an f-shaped rune scraped on it. Steve recalls having seen it somewhere, maybe in a movie Clint has made him watch.

Steve sets the bag on the floor and looks on as Bucky tends to the two locks in his door and pushes it open. With his hand, he motions for Steve to get inside, and hauling the suitcase over the threshold, Steve comes in. Twisting the deadbolts after him, Bucky flicks the light in the hallway on, and while Steve sheds his coat, Bucky wanders deeper into the flat to turn the lamps on in other rooms that need it.

Now, after everything that’s happened, the hall looks different, though Steve knows that aside from some pairs of shoes missing from their cabinet, the place hasn’t changed at all. A tattered note that reads _Take care of yourself. Love, Mom_ in looped handwriting is still tucked behind the frame of the round mirror on the wall, and a cracked seashell is still lying in the blue ceramic key bowl that stands next to a plant potted in a big black teacup.

Bucky’s house is a library of mementos and trinkets collected over the years, that to an outside eye would seem pieces of garbage worth nothing but throwing away. But Bucky distributes them across his living space, leaves them behind like a proud bird decorating its nest with colorful pebbles; it’s plain to see that he’s a sentimental kind of man.

When Bucky comes back out into the hallway, he’s illuminated by the bright light from the joined kitchen and living room. He toes off his sneakers, kicking them down the floor to land next to Steve’s neatly lined up leather boots. When he makes to slide his unbuttoned coat off his shoulders, Steve comes forward.

“Let me?” he says. Bucky laughs, big and throaty, and he drops his hands, turning around to let Steve take his coat.

Steve’s ma saw to it to raise him her absolute best so he’d up grow into a gentleman through and through, as dreadfully poor as they were. She ingrained in him proper manners, the code of chivalry, she fed him rules of savoir vivre over a plate of boiled cabbage. When Steve was twelve, she saved up enough of her measly salary to take her son to the movies for Christmas. In the aisle in front of theirs, a man took singular care of his outerwear, leaving the woman he came with to herself, and Sarah Rogers dutifully whispered into Steve’s ear: ‘Always remember to take your love’s coat, Steven’.

The wool of Bucky’s peacoat is cold to the touch, dotted with half-melted snowflakes that thaw against Steve’s skin.

“You know it’s my house, right?” Bucky says as Steve hangs the garment alongside his own in the compact little closet set into the wall. Bucky’s arms come to wrap around Steve’s waist from behind, and Steve covers the hands laced on his stomach with his. Bucky’s hands are ice cold - _he didn’t wear gloves_ , Steve’s inner mother hen supplies.

“Then you made a mistake inviting me, ‘cause I’m gonna do everything for you,” Steve says.

“I don’t see how that’s a mistake,” Bucky mutters.

Steve turns around in his arms. Bucky’s cheeks and nose are still red from the cold, and Steve raises his hands to frame his face, angling Bucky’s head up for a kiss. Melting into Steve’s embrace, Bucky moans softly; a small sound you release when you bury yourself under heaps of blankets, in nothing but your underwear, after you’ve come home drenched by rain.

Bucky is a fantastic kisser. Steve isn’t bad himself (he’s quite skilled, actually, not to toot his own horn - he’s had his fair share of locking lips with dames and a couple of fellas back then, opposite to what everyone thinks of him), but Bucky is a natural. Steve’s been told that with the right person, kissing doesn’t require effort, and making out with Bucky is just that - easy, narcotic, remarkably easy to lose oneself in, like swimming in a tropical ocean.

They break the kiss when Bucky’s stomach loudly demands indivisible attention.

Bucky laughs. “Sorry,” he says, pillowing his forehead on Steve’s shoulder.

“No reason to be,” Steve says. He runs his hands up and down Bucky’s back, feels the ridge of Bucky’s spine under his cable-knit sweater. The tip of Bucky’s nose is pressing into the side of Steve’s neck. “I’m hungry, too, actually.”

They end up cuddled up on the sofa, ordering Indian take-out from a restaurant Bucky swears by. Bucky, Steve learns, has a soft spot for lots of spice in his food - he chooses beef vindaloo from the restaurant’s website, and for Steve, who’s not big on burning his mouth with chili, he recommends chicken tikka masala that Steve thinks he’s once eaten in Midtown in the spring.

“I want to hit the shower, you gonna be alright for a while?” Bucky says as he shuts his laptop. Steve pulls him closer to his side, presses a kiss against Bucky’s temple, and Bucky smiles, the kind of warm, lazy grin that reminds Steve of early morning sunlight reflecting in skyscrapers’ windows when he goes for a run at dawn.

“No, I’m gonna get lost on your couch,” Steve says. “Of course I’m gonna be alright, Buck.”

Bucky stands up, letting go of Steve’s hand that he’s been holding ever since they sat down. “Make yourself at home.” He leans down and lays a single kiss on Steve’s lips, short and chaste but full of promise, that Steve savours like the finest wine. “I’ll be twenty minutes at most.”

Bucky crosses the room to dig an armful of items out of his suitcase: a towel, a black bag Steve presumes holds Bucky’s toiletries, and a bundle of clothes that must be his pyjamas. It’s a prosaic task, but Steve can’t tear his eyes away from Bucky; his body moves smoothly as he gets up from the floor and walks towards the bathroom, full of grace contained in the long, tight lines of muscle under his clothes. He’s like the adept alpha of a pack of wolves, calm and benign but ready to strike when essential.

“Hang tight, doll,” Bucky winks over his shoulder, closing the door to the bathroom after himself. Steve’s guts turn to cotton wool.

A few quiet minutes pass. Then the steady hum of the shower starts up, along with a subdued melody of a song that Bucky must be playing from his phone.

Left to his own devices, Steve evaluates the living room. The mounds of papers that were coating the coffee table earlier today have vanished to reveal what has initially been under them - an orderly stack of three big, hard-bound books. Not wanting to disturb their shipshape, Steve examines the book on top of the pyramid. Its cover bears a scaled-up photo of a beautiful interior in beiges and oranges, with the title _May I Come In?_ written over it in stylized white letters. Steve would love to leaf through it.

Bucky told Steve to make himself at home, but that doesn’t change the fact that Steve’s in his house for the second time and he’d rather keep his hands to himself, especially considering that the apartment’s owner is, for the time being, unable to prevent any damage Steve might unintentionally cause. ‘Unintentionally’ being the key word.

With not many choices entertainment-wise, Steve decides to fetch his phone that he’s left in the kitchen to charge, and he texts Natasha.

 _Staying at Bucky’s for the night. -SR_ , he types and hits send. Before he can switch it off, his phone buzzes with an answer.

_who the hell is bucky?_

It’s followed closely by: _oh my. is that your boy toy?_

Choosing to turn a deaf ear to Nat’s unfortunate choice of words, Steve shoots back with a simple, _Yes._

When she replies with, _merry xmas. use condoms_ , fast as lightning, Steve turns his phone off.

Suddenly, Bucky’s voice is bleeding through the running water’s continual noise, singing a song Steve thinks he knows. Bucky’s tenor is big and scratchy, and it vibrates with strength as he skids facilely through the slow song’s lyrics.

Steve chuckles quietly when the singing is interrupted by a clatter and a faint, “Shit”.

When Steve woke up in the XXI-st century, he was, for lack of a better word, a human fossil with not much in it except for a shag of anguish and fury. It took him a long time and the faithful assistance of his SHIELD-issued psychologist to morph back into being his own person. Even then, though, his fears and anxieties remained rooted deep in his core.

He’s stopped hoping for love early on, back when he still felt the whisper of the ice in his bones. He put the yearning part of him that longed for that spark away in a convenient little drawer, locked it up, and threw the key into the Hudson River. The need for affection faded away, but despite becoming only a dull throb, it never disappeared. With the passing months, Steve’s learned to ignore it; his chance at loving and being loved back plummeted into the cold waters of the Arctic Ocean, sinking to the ocean floor with the Valkyrie, he thought.

But now, with Bucky singing Adele behind the closed door a few feet away, Steve feels a wilted part of him being brought back to life, as though it’s a withering plant that perks up after being generously watered. Bucky is different, intriguing, from a new, shiny time, but his soul aligns with Steve’s like two pieces of a cup cracked in half. He’s what Steve needs, or has needed for a long time: a person to love openly and abundantly without holding back.

When the door to the bathroom opens a couple of minutes later, a fresh Bucky walks out clouded by steam. A pretty flush from the shower’s heat is blooming across his face and neck, disappearing under the collar of his dark, short-sleeved shirt that leaves little to the imagination when it comes to exposing his toned arms. He looks stunning, soft and vulnerable yet strong all at once.

“Hi,” Steve grins, a tad breathless.

“Hello,” Bucky smiles back when he stops directly in front of Steve, hovering over him. Steve puts his hands on Bucky’s hips, slides his thumbs over the hipbones he feels jutting out above the waistband of Bucky’s flannel pants. Down the length of one pant leg, there’s yellow letters forming the word _Hufflepuff_ \- it’s from that Harry Potter series, Steve thinks, and then he remembers that according to Clint, he’s a Slytherin.

As reported by Nat, meanwhile, Slytherins and Hufflepuffs are often the most compatible pairs. It’s funny, how that thought strikes a fluttering to fan across Steve’s torso.

Bucky rests his forearms on Steve’s shoulders, crossing his wrists loosely behind Steve’s head. “Can I kiss you?” he murmurs.

There’s a rivulet of water sliding from his damp hair down his neck, that Steve wants to lick off.

“You can,” Steve says. “The question is if you may.”

“You’re awful,” Bucky huffs and bends down to press their lips together.

The sensation of kissing Bucky is still overwhelming to Steve. The dexterous slide of Bucky’s tongue, the fullness of his bottom lip make Steve feel like a blushing youngster getting smooched on Valentine’s Day by the greatest catch in the neighborhood.

“If you want to go freshen up, I laid out some stuff for you on top of the washing machine,” Bucky says when he pulls away. Scritching his nails through the short hairs at Steve’s nape, he pecks the tip of Steve’s nose, then his cupid’s bow, light and sweet. Steve feels like an adored puppy as Bucky works his fingers through his hair, massaging his scalp. He could stay like this forever, he thinks, petted by Bucky’s loving hands into eternity.

“You suggesting something, Barnes?” Steve teases, wrapping his arms around Bucky’s middle, and tugs him closer. Bucky lets himself be pulled into another kiss.

“Yeah, Rogers, you stink like a gaggle of pigs and the reason you’re still here is because I stuck beans up my nose not to smell you,” Bucky retorts as they part for air.

“My feelings are deeply hurt and I’m going to cry in the shower, just so you know,” Steve says, but his statement is contradicted by the kiss he lays on Bucky’s breastbone. Bucky smells clean, like fabric softener and something lemony.

“Remember to clean the snot off my tiles,” he says.

“You want me to descale the basin, too?”

“Excuse you, Steven, my basin is impeccable. Say you’re sorry.”

“I sincerely apologize for berating your basin, Buck.”

“Good.”

Steve hoists himself up, hands still bracketing Bucky’s hips as he rotates them so the backs of Bucky’s knees hit the edge of the couch. “The bathroom’s that way?” Steve tips his head to the left, in the direction of the half-open door.

“You literally saw me walk out of there,” Bucky says. “I didn’t go to Narnia to shower, believe it or not.”

“Oh yeah? You might as well have, ‘cause you’re magical.”

“Oh my God, get out of here.”

“Fair enough,” Steve laughs, backing down with his hands in the air. The last thing he sees before he enters the bathroom is Bucky rearranging the couch cushions, a sunshine grin peeking through the wet fringe framing his face as he leans down to fluff a throw pillow with a comical print of a corgi.

 

* * *

 

“The thing is, he’s not a horrible person, he acts like this to protect himself,” Bucky says, scooping some of Steve’s sauce onto a piece of naan bread and guiding it to his mouth with a hand under his chin, careful not to stain the comforter he and Steve are wrapped up in.

On the screen of Bucky’s laptop, a young, sharply attractive man in crisp Edwardian attire is smoking a cigarette, his face partially hidden by the shadows of a doorway he’s standing in, conspiring with a sour-looking lady’s maid.

Bucky was five seasons deep into the British period drama they’re watching, but he clicked back to the first episode when only Steve expressed a word of interest in the series that popped up in Bucky’s recents on Netflix.

“Yeah, no, I get that,” Steve says, stealing a spoonful of Bucky’s beef in retaliation. “I’m just saying, he doesn’t have to be that obnoxious.”

“I mean, yeah.” Bucky stifles a yawn. “He’s my favorite anyway, though.”

They’re resting against each other in Bucky’s bed, their arms pressed together. Steve is wearing a pair of Bucky’s pyjamas that Bucky’s second youngest sister has bought for him in London but has misjudged his size, going two numbers up (Bucky’s convinced she did it on purpose, ‘the little shit’). It’s a plaid, two-piece set that Bucky said makes Steve look like a picnic blanket, but Steve only flashed him the bird while Bucky was busy being in stitches - he may look like the set-up for the perfect summer date, but he’s comfortable as _fuck_. Laura Barnes knew perfectly what she was spending her pounds on.

Steve caresses Bucky’s hair, playing with the long strands at the crown of Bucky’s head. They’ve had time to dry, but when they were still damp, they were even more alike to expensive velvet than they are now, soft like a summer cloud.

“You’re tired, aren’t you,” Steve says, foregoing making it a question. Hiding another yawn in his palm, Bucky nods. The digital clock in the upper right corner of the laptop’s screen is displaying half past eleven pm, and, to be fair, both Steve and Bucky could use a good night’s sleep. It’s been an eventful day.

“We’ve got three minutes of the episode left,” Bucky says. “You wanna finish it first?”

Steve kisses his forehead. “Yeah, okay.”

As soon as the last frame fades to black, Steve closes the laptop, heaving himself out of the warm bed to put the computer on Bucky’s desk. When he turns back around, Bucky is already on his feet, stacking the empty foam containers on top of each other in his arms. A corner of his rucked-up shirt is caught behind his waistband, and the legs of his pants are an inch too long, skimming the floor when he stands. He looks adorably rumpled.

An inadvertent giggle bubbles up in Steve’s throat, evoked by the spilling multitude of feelings brewing in his chest. He’s so lucky to have found his man, to have been so unbelievably fortunate as to capture his heart for himself, not only because of how heavenly Bucky is, but also because of how Steve isn’t. He’s endured inhuman amounts of pain - perhaps Bucky is his golden prize, the person who makes all these cruel years worth the suffering.

“Hang on, give me some of these,” Steve says. He relieves Bucky of half the boxes and together, they pace out into the kitchen to dump them into the trash.

While they brush their teeth in the bathroom, Steve holds Bucky’s hand. They both stain each other’s shirts with splatters of toothpaste that they, laughing, wash out with a wet sponge, and when they’re done, they put their toothbrushes in the same grey cup with a scuff mark running down the middle.

After they climb back into bed, all of the apartment’s lights turned off and the curtains drawn, Bucky scurries back under the covers in the darkness until his back is pressed up tightly against Steve’s chest. Pleasantly surprised, Steve wraps his arms around Bucky’s waist. His hand is immediately caught in a slack grasp of Bucky’s calloused fingers.

Outside, a group of tipsy people are laughing, their shouts muted by the closed window. A car drives by, its headlights casting bright streaks on the wall, plunging the room into darkness again after it passes further down the street.

“Goodnight,” Bucky whispers.

“Goodnight,” Steve whispers back, delighted warmth skittering down his spine.

Breathing in the tangerine scent of Bucky’s shower gel, the radiator buzzing gently in the dark, Steve thinks, _This is what happiness feels like._

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [Tumblr](http://lattelyy.tumblr.com)!
> 
> Also, keep your eyes peeled for the inevitable future installments of this story ;)


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